


Between Us

by TraiM



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Bellarke, F/M, Radio, Slow Burn, season 5, space
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-28
Updated: 2020-07-31
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:13:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 21,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23885782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TraiM/pseuds/TraiM
Summary: The ship is gone, leaving Clarke on the ground, alone, with nothing but Becca's lab and a radio she isn't sure even works. Bellamy is in space, receiving radio calls he can't answer.
Relationships: Bellamy Blake/Clarke Griffin, Emori/John Murphy (The 100), Monty Green/Harper McIntyre
Comments: 45
Kudos: 175





	1. After

**Author's Note:**

> This is a fic I started around season 5. I've been considering continuing it.

_3019\. -Two months after death wave-_

She sits on the stool, elbows on the desk, gaze roving over the screens that reflect in her blue eyes. The computers have a lot to say, but she doesn't speak their language, not like Raven. She's learned some, though, enough to read between the lines; she knows radiation levels have not decreased since the death wave hit, sixty-nine days ago. She knows the bunker may have suffered damage, due to the severed radio connection and how her end only ever delivers a white static. Based off her scans, she knows there's no definitive way to be positive of her immunity to radiation. She doesn't need the computers to tell her she is running low on rations.

She takes a deep breath and grabs the radio head. Her pulse used to quicken when she pressed the receiver down. After a month of silence, it stopped doing that.

"This is Clarke Griffin," she says, feeling her voice bound about her, hollow. "It's day sixty-nine, and radiation levels still show no change. I've tried to contact the bunker, but without any luck." Clarke stops for a moment, just long enough to think about her next words. If she can bear them. "I don't know if they're alive," she whispers, "But I hope they are. I hope you are, Bellamy." Now she stops abruptly and drags in a deeper breath, one that burns her lungs. She clears her throat before continuing. "I'm fine on rations for now, but they won't last much longer. Anyone listening knows what that means." She pauses, as if letting the ghost of static fill in the space of someone's reply. She swallows tightly. "That's it," she says quietly. "I'll update again tomorrow."

She sets the radio back on the desk with a dull _thud._

**********

"Raven, you have to fix it."

"We've been over this, Blake. I _can't_. We're two thousand miles above the Earth's atmosphere. An atmosphere that is currently uninhabitable, courtesy of the end-of-the-world-take-two. Besides, no radio is operable through the amount of radiation that takes every frequency and plays jump rope with it."

Bellamy runs his fingers through his hair and clenches his jaw so tight, his jaw aches. Sixty nine days. Sixty nine days of being sealed back inside a metal world with seven other people, some of who he doesn't even like. And those of who he does, he finds himself liking less after two months kept within a three-hundred yard radius of one another.

For days, tensions have been on the rise, between Murphy and Monty, Emori and Echo. Himself and Echo. This ship is a condensed version of the Ark, but at least on the Ark there were quiet places to go. There had been _privacy_. Here it is harder to afford. At least, if feels like it. There are no woods to lose himself in. No streams to wash off a day's work. No life beyond the seven beings inside. As it turns out, it is easier to be born behind walls than to be forced back into them and after living under an endless sky, the ship is starting to feel less like their hope and more like their tomb. The sensation of feeling trapped is starting to put Bellamy's teeth on edge.

Particularly now, when his feelings of helplessness threaten to overwhelm his frustration. "You're the one who got the rocket up here," he grinds, standing beside Raven as she moves from screen to screen, eyes darting from one to the other in quiet assessment. "You were the one who said a hundred things could go wrong but we found a way to survive on this ship. And now you're telling me there is absolutely nothing we can do to salvage our connection with the others?"

Raven sighs and drops her shoulders. She keeps her gaze on the screen though, but Bellamy doesn't need to see to know she's no longer reading it. "There's only one thing we can do," she says.

He makes the mistake of feeling hopeful. "What is it?"

Raven looks at him, brown eyes resolved. "We wait."

Bellamy grinds his teeth and looks away, staring at one of the screens relaying radiation levels on Earth. No change. "You heard the same thing I did," he says. "She's running out of time." Only weeks ago was it when he first heard her voice, after a month spent believing that she was dead. He doesn't want to mourn her a second time. He can't.

"Clarke's smart," Raven says, returning to her test runs and readings. "She'll figure something out."

But Bellamy does not miss the doubt in her voice any more than he missed it in Clarke's.

********

"Day ninety-two. Radiation levels are the same. No contact has been made between me and the bunker, or the ship for that matter." Clarke lets her gaze wander to the stairs. "I'm . . . almost at my last ration, so I guess I'll be taking a walk soon." she shuts her eyes for a moment, biting her lip just hard enough to make herself wince. "I'll be using one of the suits to see if gradual exposure makes any difference. If not . . . Bellamy, if you're listening, I want you to know that it's okay. And thank you. For not waiting. You did what you had to. I know you'll help keep everyone safe." She takes a deep breath, "May we meet again."

With that, she replaces the radio and stands. The suit she wears makes her movements slow, the color of a sleet grey sky and bearing the same weight as it. She grabs the helmet from the desk and sets it back over her head, trying to tell herself she may not be walking to her death. That there is hope. But if she can't contact anyone, what good will it do her?

When Clarke reaches the door, she checks again to make sure she has not forgotten the small knife. No, it is still there, tucked in her belt, waiting. Ready. She pulls it out and stands a little straighter, facing a slate world, sucked of any color and light. A graveyard. With shaky, gloved hands, Clarke unlocks the door and pulls it open.

A blast of freezing air hits her, so cold it chills her blood. She walks down the small flight before stepping on dirt. Or, what once was dirt. For the first time since the death wave, Clarke is outside. Nd for a dismal moment, she allows herself to see what has become of her world for the second time. The river is gone. The trees are ash. The ground is pulverized into a black dust that clings to the soles of her shoes. North, South, East and West coalesce into confusion. Every direction displays the same dead picture, until Clarke has to remind herself to breathe.

She squeezes her eyes shut until white explodes behind her lids. Her grip on the knife tightens enough to remind her and a calm sweeps past. Keeping her eyes closed, Clarke lifts the knife to her helmet. She aims the tip at the seam running beneath her jaw. And against the black canvas of her eyelids, she reassembles the world as it used to be. Wild foliage rich in blue and purple flowers, spattering hillsides and infusing the air with the smell of pine after a light rain. She thinks of the bubbling brook, folding over rocks and disappearing in a jump over the falls. She draws it like she remembers, willing it back into existence as she catches the fabric of her suit with the knife, and rents it open.

**************

He can't breathe. The space is too small, the concave walls bearing down on him like he is caught in a massive hand that is slowly squeezing into a fist. On the other side of the radio is just silence. Clarke has nothing more to say and he thinks she has left. Which pisses Bellamy off for about the umpteenth time that he can't respond. That he is forced to sit and listen to this. Guilt eats away at him, heating his blood until he wants to move but there is nowhere for him to go. I should've given her more time, he thinks. He thinks it every day, every morning her voice comes on the radio. A hundred times more at the possibility of never hearing it again.

He also knows he would have done the same thing over, if he had to.

The door to the small cell he is tucked away inside rattles. The side of it is mangled from the landing, making it impossible to seal from the outside.

Bellamy doesn't even need to look to know who it is; they each know one another down to the simple rhythm of their footsteps.

"What is it, Monty?" He asks, a bite to his words.

Monty stays at the door, looking in on the man seated on the ground over pictures depicted in pencil, of trees and spring water, flowers and sunsets and things that are now nothing more than ash. "Raven asked me to check in on you."

Bellamy says nothing, letting his silence be his answer.

"How's she doing?"

Bellamy's grip over the radio tightens. How do you think? He almost responds. Instead he pulls in a tired breath. "Not good." He doesn't give voice to the possibilities painting out terrible scenarios in his mind. Clarke in trouble. Clarke in pain. Clarke dead. At least he knows his sister is okay, whether that be in a bunker under rubble or not. She has the others and she's safe. Clarke has no one, and she is outside.

Monty lingers by the door, as if debating whether or not to say something. After a few empty moments, he risks it. "Maybe you should stop doing this to yourself, Bellamy. It's only making things worse for you."

This time Bellamy looks at him, shoving away his anger. He knows Monty's words come from a good place, but that doesn't make them any more welcome. "Tell Raven I'll be here if she needs me."

"Bellamy-"

"Was there something else you needed?"

Monty stares at him, monolid eyes sad. They still hold the loss of Jasper in them, open and heavy, like a wound that hasn't healed properly. Maybe they never do.

He gives a brusquely nod. "Guess that's it." He leaves, shutting the door quietly behind him.

Bellamy returns his attention to the radio, as if willing Clarke's voice to reappear on the other side of it. He imagines her walking alone, two thousand miles beneath his feet.

An hour passes. Two. But he doesn't leave. He waits, feeling his heart fall down the rungs of his ribs the longer her silence drags out.

 _C'mon, Clarke,_ he begs. _Say something. Come back._

But the silence continues until he changes his mind and he decides he would have risked waiting for her after all.

***********

The wind burns.

It's like the air cannot decide if it's hot or freezing, so it has become both, a breath of ice one moment before it heats into a vapor fire that caresses Clarke's cheeks and makes her skin boil.

Her breath turns to lead. Her lungs burn until she can't fill them anymore and the world becomes a watercolor mess that runs black and grey. Her boot sinks into the ground and she loses her footing. The impact rubs against her flaming skin and she thinks she screams.

 _Inside!_ Her mind shrieks. _Get inside!_

Clarke fumbles forward to a crawl, breathing in small spurts. The stairs swim before her and she strains for the first, clamoring up on her hands and knees. A coppery tang fills her mouth.

 _Not yet,_ she thinks. _Not yet, not yet._

She is almost at the top and struggles to the door, gloved hand outstretched before her, eyes fixed just beyond her fingertips. A small ember inside her flares to life. _Fight,_ it demands, _Keep fighting._

But the ember fades as quickly as it is born, and Clarke doesn't remember if she reaches it or not.

***********

Nearly seven hours have passed since Clarke last spoke on the radio. That's four-hundred-and-twenty minutes of empty radio static. Of possibilities that come to Bellamy so fast they trip over one another in their haste to be the forefront. But they all end the same way, with Clarke's silence.

He rubs his eyes and pinches the bridge of his nose; runs a hand through his hair. Raven has stopped by once to ensure everything was still accounted for. She only needed to look at his face to know what Clarke had decided to do and to also know she had yet to respond. Raven told him to give her more time. Maybe she reached the bunker. Maybe she couldn't carry the radio. Maybe a lot of things but the loudest of them all, turning up in volume until Bellamy's ears were ringing with it. She's not immune. She's dead.

They still ring with it, delivering Bellamy a dull headache he's almost grateful for.

He brushes his fingertips over the drawing of trees, smudging the lead with the pad of his thumb. Again he tries to imagine a golden-haired girl angled over the floor as she brings the walls of her prison to life with nothing more than a stub of pencil.

Bellamy leans his head against the wall and shuts his eyes, building a wall against the onslaught of if's and shouldve's, wishes and maybe's that continue to bombard him.

 _C'mon, Clarke,_ he thinks one last time. _I haven't given up on you yet._

And he still doesn't, not even when seven hours stretch taught into eight. Not when the dull headache turns into a cranial pound. Not when sleep nearly overtakes him, and only the faint crackle of static jars him back.

His breathing stops. He holds the radio in still fingers, his gaze locked on a drawing of flowers sprouting by the door. He waits.

 _"I'm alive,"_ Clarke's voice rasps from the speaker.


	2. Candles in the Dark

She has run out of bandages. The white linen is stained, balled up at the bottom of a waste basket. Just as well; they don't seem to be helping her much and the suit just ruins the ones she's already applied.

It takes nearly three weeks before everything begins to heal and she can actually speak without gritting her teeth against the nails dragging down the chalkboard of her throat.

Clarke doesn't remember reaching the lab, only what came after, when she woke up inside it. She doesn't have to have any medical training to know there will be scars. They're already showing, blooming like white poppies over her skin. As if they're a primary concern of hers. She nearly scoffs. No, being able to tolerate radiation was only part of the bigger issue at hand. Now there are greater obstacles to face, like the most immediate one of her having finally reached her last ration. It's tasteless in her mouth and chafes at her raw throat.

She swallows the last of it and picks up the radio, weighing it in her palm. After a moment, she lifts it to her lips and thumbs the receiver. "Day one-hundred-and-ten. Sorry it's been over two weeks since I last updated. I've been . . . A little preoccupied."

A part of her relaxes into the comfort of this familiarity, as she imagines the face of the man hearing her words. Praying he hears them. "Radiation levels are the same. Not much of a surprise there. On the brighter side, I'm not dead, which leads me to believe the Nightblood treatment worked. I have to test it again today. If I want to live, I mean. The rations are gone so it's time for me to start improvising." She stops for a breath before continuing, gauging the details she should relay. "Still no word from the bunker. If everything works out, I'll be able to travel over there soon. I'll check for damages on the outside, make sure it's all still sealed so you can be confident Octavia and the others are safe." The image of her mom flashes through Clarke's mind and she squeezes her eyes shut against the pain. How much she wishes she'd gotten the chance to say goodbye. To say more the last time she saw her. To have hugged her mother for a heartbeat longer.

Clarke shakes off the thought; buries it among the other needless wishes that are dust in her hands.

She opens her eyes again. "I hope things are going well up there. That it's not too hard to be without the sky. It's not an appealing sight anymore, if that's any consolation. You can't even see the stars." She leans her head against the seat, looking up at the ceiling as if picturing the vastness of space beyond it. "Trust me," she murmurs wistfully, her voice floating about her in the stillness. "I've tried."

*************

It takes seventeen days for her voice to appear again.

Within that time, Bellamy nearly believes her to be dead. Again. But after doubting her the last time, he holds onto whatever faint glow of hope he has that she is alive today.

He tries to keep busy, doing his normal rounds, pulling his workload, making his daily check-ins to ensure their tiny metal world is not in jeopardy of falling apart. Inside him though, right between his ribs is a fist of nervous energy, unraveling more and more until a bite has appeared in his tone and his hands are perpetually clenched at his sides. The others take notice but they don't ask, already knowing what it's about. They all work, and Bellamy's fear gets a little louder, a little more tangible with every day that passes.

_Maybe something went wrong._

_Maybe she's not immune._

_Maybe she's really gone this time._

_Maybe she's really gone this time._

But he doesn't give up, and it is then that he hears it, the usual time he drops into the cell for a moment of quiet. The moments that used to be filled with her voice. One second there is nothing. In the next, the radio crackles, and Bellamy drops by the metal box, scrambling for the speaker. Everything in him pulls taught, an arrow ready to fly. He shuts his eyes. Please. Please.

_"Day-one-hundred-and-ten. Sorry it's been over two weeks since I last updated. I've been . . . preoccupied."_

Bellamy let's out a breath he's been holding for seventeen days and his relief actually makes him smile. He rests his back against the wall, radio in hand, taking in the fact that she's alive. There's a strain in her voice that tells him not everything is all right, but she's breathing, and for him that's good enough.

 _"Radiation levels are the same. On the bright side, I'm not dead . . ."_ Bellamy listens to her update, trying to shove away his worry at the mention of her diminished supply. She may be immune, but not even Luna tried to consume materials with those levels of radiation. The end of the world changes a lot, and there is no guarantee Clarke's reaction will even mirror Luna's. But it's not like she has any alternative.

Bellamy presses a fist to his forehead, hating again that all he can do is listen to her struggle. But it's more bearable than her silence.

For the most part.

He listens as she tells him how she plans to go after the bunker. _Don't do anything stupid,_ he wishes he could tell her.

 _"I hope things are going well up there,"_ she continues. _"That it's not too hard to be without the sky."_

 _I miss the land more,_ he concedes.

_"It's not an appealing sight anymore, if that's any consolation."_

It's not.

 _"You can't even see the stars."_ He hears the small catch in her voice. _"Trust me, I've tried."_

Bellamy pulls himself to his feet, taking the radio with him. He shoves aside the battered, metal door and enters a stretch of corridor, coming to a stop before a window that displays a cluster of novas, burning like candles in the dark.

 _They're still here,_ he thinks. _Trust me._


	3. Small Places

"It's day one-hundred-and-one," Clarke says into the receiver, "and I'm still here. You have the irradiated deer meat to thank for that. It actually makes me miss the freeze-dried rations you're probably having to put up with, so no complaining." She tucks a strand of hair behind her ear, contemplating as she does everyday how much to tell. "In the last week, I've learned that the Nightblood treatment is holding and I don't think I'll be needing any part of the suit for much longer."

Though faintly scarred, everything is where it should be. She is still whole.

On the outside, anyway.

"It feels good to be outside again. It may not be the most attractive nature walk I've been on, but I'm able to get a scope of the area. See exactly what's left." She does not tell him the sight has brought her to tears. She does not share, in detail, the wasteland Earth has become. She does not tell him of her drawings, that after running out of pencils, she's begun to paint with ashes instead.

"If our radio-feed could travel both ways, Raven could instruct me on the statistical aspects of everything. Maybe it would help somehow." Clarke shakes her head. "But we both know that doesn't really matter, does it?"

Of course, there is no reply.

She shuts her eyes against the tears that threaten to fall. "That's what I thought."

*************

His dreams yank him from sleep in a sudden jolt.

One moment he is lying in bed, and the next he is sitting bolt upright, sweat dampening his hair and stinging his eyes.

The in-between of those two moments are usually the same, full of flashes of memories that play on repeat. There's only ever two, but they go back and forth. Back and forth. In the first, he is back on the hill, donned in a suit that weighs him down as he looks into blue eyes before he turns in the opposite direction and walks away.

The second is the worst. In it, he is back at the lab, staring after a door he know won't open in time. He gets into the rocket. He stares out the window, waiting and waiting. And here is when it changes; just as the rocket prepares to launch, the door swings open and in stumbles Clarke.

Bellamy tries to tell the others to wait. To let her on. But it's too late. The rocket has already launched and each time he is forced to watch as he leaves her behind.

They don't happen every day, but they happen enough to never let him forget. As if he can.

Today is one of those days and Bellamy shakes it off as best he can before starting on his daily work that has become routine. Still, it clings to him like humidity once did, as he leaves his room and heads for the bridge.

Since arriving at the Ark, no title has been adapted to him. He is not a mechanic or an engineer. There aren't any external threats that would require a guard of him. He is more like the others, in that he does what needs to be done, under the directions of those who understand wires and physics, namely Raven and Monty.

But there are times when it seems the others looks to him as a leader of sorts. But to be the only leader of the Ark would render Bellamy as Chancellor, and that is a thought that leaves him feeling like a little boy again, with precious secrets tucked beneath the floor. No, If Bellamy is a leader on this Ark then so is Raven, which means they are co-leaders in this scenario. But that doesn't make this the dropship anymore than it makes Raven Clarke.

And it wouldn't be fair to wish it that way either. The Ark is not Earth. Here, it is different. Here, he doesn't cool under Raven's calm, because Raven is fire. When her temper flares, it stokes his, until one has to remedy the stubbornness of the other.

But it works, in a way unlike the relationship he shared with Clarke did. On the ground, he and Clarke had always been opposites; reason and emotion shouldering rifles as they stood side by side. Where she had been the quiet mind to his loud heart, Raven has become the amplifier to it. The spitfire mechanic is more like him than he ever realized before, which renders any agreements resolute and any disagreements . . . an absolute pain.

The others have already begun their work. Bellamy passes Monty checking the oxygen supply to ensure they are not overcompensating, as he does every Thursday. In the area that used to be a council room are Harper and Echo, with Emori probably somewhere close by. As he anticipated, the adjustment to space has proven the most challenging for the two grounders, united only in the commonality that they were both born beneath a sky rather than in the stars. It's hardly incited any bonding between the two, but Bellamy thinks time will change that. At least, he hopes it will.

Raven, predictably, is in the control room, fiddling with her screens and tests and doing a multitude of things Bellamy can never hope to understand.

There is never much that has to be done, and what is to be usually consists of the same thing, occasionally in a different order, but always predictable. Always unsurprising. Three months have passed since leaving the ground and he still doesn't know what to do with all the quiet after a year of war and ruin.

Today that quiet seems extra loud, and the time goes slower than usual. He tends to his work, making sure everything is is in working order, because things can change very quickly when you're only seven people running a ship. When he's finished, he goes where he does every afternoon, to the cell or to his room, the two best places to sit and to listen.

Sure enough, Clarke's update rattles over the speaker and he relaxes. The first part she says makes him smile, before her voice becomes more serious-more somber-and he knows it is going to be a short update today.

He's not an idiot; he knows she does that on purpose, never saying everything she really wants to. Probably to spare him, and that lights the fuse to his temper, until he has to put it completely out of mind if he doesn't want the guilt to consume him. _She is still trying to protect _him_ , when sometimes Bellamy just wants her to tell him everything. To shout, to cry, to _put_ it all someplace rather than locking it behind a facade of complacency where he cannot go._

_How many times had he blamed her when she left him behind? How many mistakes of his had he pinned on her, fastened by the thought: _if only she had been here?_ Now it is the other way around, and she won't even divulge to him how much she's hurting, because she doesn't want to make him feel responsible for it. She's said as much and Bellamy keeps waiting for the break, for the hardness to self-destruct. But it doesn't. And the more he waits for it, the closer he comes to it himself._

_On his way back to the control room, Bellamy tries to massage the tension from his neck. Circadian bulbs light his way and he's never hated artificial light more than when they'd first arrived and it took a week for his headache to finally recede. Again, he wishes he were back on Earth and it takes him only a moment before he remembers that the sun does not shine there either._

_He hears Murphy before he sees him, a saunter in the echo of his footsteps, appearing at the bend in the corridor. The other man wears similar attire to Bellamy's; a simple white shirt and dark cargo pants. His hands are crammed into the pockets and when Bellamy nods and passes him, Murphy loiters before swinging back around. He calls after him._

_Bellamy turns back._

_"How's she handling it?" Murphy asks, his voice droll. But there's an emotion in his eyes, one that runs deeper than curiosity but is too guarded to be considered concern._

_"The radiation?"_

_"The isolation."_

_Bellamy knew what he meant._

_He stands straighter to hide the wilt on the inside. "She's strong," is his answer. "She'll make it through this." Because she didn't survive the end of the world just to die after it._

_"That's what you say," replies Murphy, resting his side against the wall. He stares at him intently. "But you don't know what it's like to be _trapped_ in a place. Having no one to talk to." He scuffs his shoe against the ground. "Even a prisoner has guards to talk to. And even if they don't say anything, they listen. But Clarke has no one."_

_"She has us," Bellamy says. " _We_ are listening."_

_"But it's not like she knows that. For all _she_ knows, her words are just filling up an empty space in the sky."_

_Bellamy's hands tighten into fists and his eyes narrow. "It's not the same as what happened to you. She has her mom waiting for her. It's not indefinite."_

_"Maybe not," he agrees. "But there's a big difference between a few months and five years." He has the sensitivity to simper. Barely. "I'm just saying-"_

_"What _are_ you saying?" Bellamy asks, his words broken to a sharp point. "Do you think that I don't know this is going to be hard for her?" He points towards the wall, gesturing to the world beyond it. "That the fact that she's on her own isn't going to _change_ her?" He's tried to imagine it for himself, what it would be like to be so alone. He's considered how he would occupy the time, going so far as to compose a mental list of all the things he could do, with the days that it would require added up in total. But no matter how much he thinks of it, no matter how many options he produces, he still never manages to exceed three hundred days._

_If Murphy is fazed by the warning in Bellamy's voice, he doesn't show it, and his stoic expression remains unshaken. "Oh, I think you do. And I also think that it's gonna get worse. This isn't a war she can strategize against, Bellamy. This isn't a lever she can just pull to irradiate the problem. Like you said, she's the only one on the ground, by herself, and we're not even one year in. She's got four more to go."_

_Bellamy shakes his head. He takes a step forward, anger and fear tempering his blood. "I'm aware of that, Murphy, so why don't you tell me your real reason for stating the obvious?"_

_The thing about John Murphy is that he is never incapable of looking someone in the eyes. He doesn't cower, even when he knows the other person is not going to like what he has to say. "I'm just not so sure you want to see what kind of person is left after all this." He gives a small shrug. "If there's any left at all."_

_The implication is a barrage and Bellamy just stares back at him. He wants to argue. Actually he wants to shove Murphy into the wall, maybe even hit him to knock some sense back into that thick head of his. But Bellamy doesn't, because somewhere deep inside of him, enfolded in a quilt of dreams and buried under his guilt, lies a darker fear._

_That maybe he is right._

_*********_

_Clarke has known silence before._

_Kept within the confines of a cell in the skybox, she knows what it's like to have no one to talk to. She knows what it means to become so familiar with an area that even the smallest details are imprinted into her memory._

_But what she doesn't know is how to do it for another four years._

_"Day one-hundred-and-sixty," she says, her voice weary to her own ears. "Nearly five months after praimfaya. I'd like to say the time's gone quick but I don't exactly have an abundance of entertainment here, Which gives me a lot of extra time to think. Not exactly sure if that's a good thing or not." She exhales a deep sigh, staring out the window she's seated before. The sky is not gun-grey anymore but an opaque silver, with a plexus of faint, crimson veins threading between tumultuous clouds._

_"I'm going for the Ark tomorrow, just to check things out. Maybe see if one of the Rovers survived. From there I'll head to the bunker like I said I would." She tries to make her voice sound more hopeful than she feels as she relays how she's been leaving the lab more. "It felt good at first, after the radiation effects wore off but . . . I think I expected it to help more than it did."_

_She stares out at the sky until her eyes burn and her heart aches. "As it turns out, the world is a really small place when you're the only one left in it."_


	4. Broken Towers

The Rover doesn't work.

When Clarke first arrived at the ruins of the Ark and managed to locate one of the vehicles that appeared mostly undamaged, she'd actually smiled. Then it had faded, when the engine refused to turn on. Initially it had been a disappointment, until the inoperable Rover became a project of hers, giving her something more to do.

Mechanics, she's learned, are like surgeons, working with bolts instead of bones, operating on steel instead of flesh. There are valves and parts with different purposes. There is a heart, secured beneath the rib cage of the hood. These are aspects she can understand, and with the help of the other, partially destroyed Rover, Clarke learns how to fix hers.

It's taken her nearly a month of study and searching. Of transferring the viable donor parts of one Rover to the other with grease-stained hands and aching fingers she's repeatedly gotten caught inside. "It was pretty frustrating for a while," she says on one of her updates, as she leans against the grill. "especially knowing Raven probably could've had it fixed within hours, but for someone who's not a mechanic, I haven't made anything explode yet, so there's that." She takes a nervous breath, turning to look back at the the Rover. She's traveled between the lab and the Ark since she found it. But today is different, because only today does Clarke thinks she's finally done it, and a warm blast of anticipation sings through her blood.

She jumps into the front seat, the radio in her lap, one hand over the key, the other clutching the speaker head. "Here goes nothing." She shuts her eyes as she puts the key into the ignition. She loosens a slow breath and repeats one word, over and over again.

_Please._

She turns the key.

At first, there is nothing.

Then the engine sputters and kicks to life, unleashing a single roar before it drops to a low idle that is quickly swallowed up by the sound of her laughter.

************

"Hey, Monty, think you could do us all a favor and whip up a batch of your moonshine?" asks Murphy as they convene in one of the commons rooms, chair pushed back, legs crossed on the table. He moves a spoon listlessly over the glass. "Might make the algae a little more interesting."

"Sure, Murphy," quips Monty on the other side, seated beside Harper. "Just give me four years and I'll get right on it."

Murphy raises his glass. "I'll be keeping you to that."

Bellamy listens to the exchange dimly, seated close by, his elbows folded on the pellucid table. It's followed by a dialogue of quips and small complaints from Murphy. "Only 1,460 more days to go," he says, and lifts the last of his water ration. He grimaces at it. "Practically right around the corner."

"It could be worse," says Monty quietly.

As if on some silent cue, the both of them cast Bellamy a glance. He doesn't need to ask what worse scenario they're considering. He already knows.

Bellamy stands up and moves away from them, relocating to another table where Echo quietly sits. He slides into the bench across from her and appraises her grim expression. It took him awhile to get used to grounders in cotton shirts and flannel pants but now it is a normal sight. If not for the braids in her hair, Echo would look like she came from the stars, as Skaikru as the rest of them.

"You're quiet today," she remarks, studying him back. He's always found the intensity of her gaze startling, but it's become a comfort. He knows Echo will not let his vigilance become blunted.

"You're one to talk," he says, voice matter-of-fact. Echo, like him, has become more silent than loud since leaving the ground. But unlike Murphy and the others, unlike himself, she doesn't complain. At first, there had been the initial claustrophobia for all of them, but once Echo had adjusted to the space and taught herself to breathe past the tight, restrictive walls, she greeted the stars with curiosity.

"They're different up here," she'd said shortly after they'd arrived. Bellamy had taken her to the port window to show her Earth, but she'd turned her focus on the stars instead.

"They're brighter, I'll give you that," Bellamy had replied.

"Not just brighter. The constellations are clearer." She lifted a finger and tapped part of the glass, just over three stars, arranged in a row. "That's _the Gona._ The Warrior." She moved her finger to the left. "And that is _Staff gon the Heda_ ; the Staff of the Commander."

Bellamy smirked. "Here it's just called the Big Dipper."

Echo looked unimpressed and motioned to another constellation. "This one you can find at any time of the year, always pointing north. It is the most important to us."

"The North Star," He said. "Ursa Minor."

"To my people it is called _the Finish Noma."_

"Which means what?"

She paused, giving him a look of reluctance, maybe even sympathy before responding. "The Last Traveler."

Bellamy had been sorry he'd asked.

He drags a hand down his face and to his neck, where he tries to massage the stiffness from it. "How's it going in Alpha?" he asks her now. "I've noticed you and Emori aren't butting heads anymore."

Echo scowls, but it fades almost instantly. "We're learning to get along, though she still doesn't trust me like the rest have started to."

Bellamy shrugs. "Trust takes time. That will never change."

"I guess it's good then that we have so much of it," she says. "Time, that is."

Bellamy covers his frown with a smirk. "You heard Murphy, only 1,460 days to go." He sees her uncertainty and his voice softens. "If the Ark could survive ninety seven years up here, we can survive four more."

"The determination shows in your eyes," she says, her gaze locking on his. "Clarke would be proud."

Bellamy winces, not because he thinks she's wrong, but because he knows she's right. He doesn't know what to say to that so he simply nods. Then his eyes fall to the clock he's been glancing at since coming to the commons. Time for her radio call.

"I better go," he says to Echo as he stands. "I'll talk to you later?"

She nods, gaze dropping to her hands.

"And Echo?"

Her eyes snap back up to his.

"For whatever it's worth, I trust you."

Her expression turns surprised enough for him to actually see it. "Like you once had?"

He deliberates a moment. "Like I'm open to the suggestion of it."

She almost smiles.

When Bellamy reaches his room, he shuts the door behind him and pulls out the radio. Today he listens to Clarke's update as he stares out the circular window that captures a bit of Earth. Sometimes he prefers the sentiment of the cell, with its drawings and its stories. But there are other times when he longs for the familiarity of the ground. When seeing Earth makes him feel closer to the ones he left there.

 _"Day three-hundred-and-sixty-seven. That's right, I haven't lost count."_ Bellamy listens to the update and shuts his eyes, imagining her here. Him there. Wherever, just as long as it includes the both of them. _"Today is a special day. If these updates are transmitting, then you already know I've been working on the Rover."_

 _Every day,_ he thinks.

_"It was pretty frustrating for a while, especially knowing that Raven probably could've had it fixed within hours. But for someone who's not a mechanic, I haven't made anything explode yet, so there's that."_

He smiles. Raven will be proud.

When he hears Clarke insert the key, he tenses. _Please,_ he thinks. _Let it work for her. Please._

The radio crackles loudly when a growl tears through the receiver, letting him know the engine is on. She's done it. He grins and closes his eyes, relieved, until another sound snags his attention. At first, he thinks it's Clarke coughing and it takes him a moment before he realizes that it's laughter. Not the kind after a storm, but the real kind. The victorious kind, and the sound takes him by such surprise that he stares at the radio. Then her joy carries to him and he's laughing with her, quietly, in the privacy of his room.

He does not think about what will happen after it fades. He knows the loneliness will creep back into her voice tomorrow. But not today.

Today, Clarke Griffin is happy.

************

The following day, Clarke takes the Rover to the bunker, stopping a couple miles away to save fuel.

It's still early and the hike takes longer than she thought. Probably because all recognizable landmarks have pretty much been reduced to dust, and Clarke has to rely primarily on her sense of direction. The radiation has made any compass useless, so she keeps to her instincts, following a break in the razed woods she thinks used to be a road.

She's grown more accustomed to the quiet outside. There are no birds to sing away the silence. No trees with branches to rustle in the wind. There is no snapping of twigs that signals an animal nearby or the chime of crickets that always comes with the setting sun. There is only her, forging a way through the cinders of a mute world.

When the city finally comes into view, Clarke can only stare. She saw the live feed. She knew what to expect. But standing before the city that has been pulled to the ground is something else. Most of the ruins are stained black. Blocks of stone jut from the ash like headstones, forming a graveyard around her.

Clarke drags in small breath as she scans the area, lips parted in shock. When she sees the tower, she starts walking, first slow, then faster until her stumbling becomes a sprint and she runs as quickly as her legs can carry her. "No," she gasps, as she weaves through the ruins, dodging rock and rubble. "No, no, no, _no."_

The closer she gets to the tower, the more its remains build, and her dodging turns into a steady climb. She has to use her hands to make it over boulders and the rough stone bites into her palms. Her ankle nearly gets caught in a crevice, but Clarke doesn't stop. She climbs, her breath sawing between her teeth. Her heart hammers against her sternum and when she reaches the top, her legs shake, but she forces herself to stand where the tower once had.

Where the bunker still is, now buried like a tomb somewhere beneath her.

Slowly, a deeper shaking starts, one that reaches to her bones. Her hands curl into fists. Cold seeps in as hot, angry tears fill her eyes and without thinking about it, she grasps the nearest slab of rock and tries to move it. And when it doesn't budge, she goes to another, then another, managing to loosen a few fragments and nothing more. Clarke pulls and shoves and tries until her muscles won't listen anymore. Only then does her anger dissipate, as the truth hits her, so heavy it weighs her down to the stones.

She will not be able to try and contact the bunker. She will not get close enough to check it for damage. She will not even get the simple luxury of touching a door, and knowing there lay life just beyond it.

Shaking, she pulls her legs into her chest.

And it is there, seated atop a broken tower, where the silence is finally punctured and the only sound on the whole of the Earth is Clarke Griffin's scream.


	5. Static

"Day three-hundred-and-sixty-eight. I went to Polis and found the tower. As for the bunker . . ." Clarke hesitates, uncertain. Should she tell him? Would she want him to, if it were the other way around?

"It's fine," she lies. "So you don't have to worry about Octavia. I on the other hand could really use some company." She hates the hitch in her voice. Today she is unable to bury it. "I miss you," she whispers, tears thick in her voice and she bites her lip until it almost bleeds. "I miss everyone. I miss people. I don't know how I'm going to do this. I don't even know if you're hearing anything that I'm saying and a part of me hopes that you're not. I don't want your guilt, Bellamy. I don't want to cause you pain. Some days are just hard. Really hard. So . . . if you are hearing this, I need you to stay alive, all right? Don't give up, and neither will I."

***********

Sitting in the cell with his back to the wall, Bellamy's hand tightens over the speaker. "I don't know how I'm going to do this," her voice fills the room, its echo suspended in the air.

He releases a shaky breath and purses his lips. His fingers tremble the more his frustration grows. If only he could do something. Anything. Anything at all, but sit and listen to the break finally hit. He shuts his eyes, gritting his teeth against the torrent of memory. Ten minutes on the clock. A closing door. _This is what Clarke would want._

_"I don't want your guilt, Bellamy."_

He scoffs quietly to himself. Of course he knows that. Just like he knows he couldn't have changed what happened if he could. Yet the guilt lingers. There must have been something I could've done different, is a song to him that just plays and plays, no matter the fact that he can't do anything about it now. Not ever.

_"I don't want to cause you pain."_

Is she? Not directly, no. It's the knowledge of her being down there, alone, that makes the guilt thrum, just as it would if he didn't receive the calls at all.

When he'd first heard her radio call, it had lifted a burden from his shoulders. It had given a piece of solace back to him. But then he picked up on the hurt in her voice. The weariness, as he got a taste through her words what saving them had cost her. And still does his conscience suffer the weight of her hurt, as if he had been the one to inflict it himself.

At the start, he'd been sorry. That faded, though, when he knew that if he could reply, she'd immediately disapprove of his regret. _Keep yourself alive. Keep them alive,_ is what she'd say. So he kept his guilt to himself, as he does now, silent but indelibly there, pressing against his sternum like a second heartbeat.

_"Don't give up, and neither will I."_

"Sounds like a promise," he mumbles, leaning his head back and staring at the ceiling above. "I won't break it if you don't."

************

The vehicle trudges through the ash and debris well enough. Winds have increased over the last few months, making travel a little more manageable. Above, the sky remains in a perpetual bad mood, maintaining an impenetrable sheet of 's decided to use the day for more distant scavenging and she takes her time, stopping every once in awhile to step out and look. Scavenging for what, though, is harder to pinpoint. She doesn't know what she expects to find each time she opens the door and climbs from the Rover, exchanging one barren plate of ground for another. She supposed she's just looking for something nameless. A something in a nothing world.

But Clarke doesn't find it, so she moves on.

It is because of the dropship that Clarke is able to locate the Hundred's camp. The last time she was here there had been trees where now there is empty dirt; a home where now there is only ash. It is nothing like she remembers and her eyes prick as she stands in the clearing. She closes her eyes and tries to call back the memories, but the smell of ash is too heavy. The longer she stands there the more her boots seem to sink into the ground. She can't even find the graves.

Back in the Rover, Clarke makes the drive to Mount Weather. Or where Mount Weather once was, now reduced to ruin before the deathwave and pulverized to fragments after it. Now there is nothing but broken rock and a shattered dam, forming a monument of rubble.

Here, the memories are louder. She can't tear those down, and she stays long enough to ensure there's nothing that can be salvaged before she returns to the Rover again and heads back to Polis to scout the area.

In the empty seat next to her lies the radio. She didn't want to miss her update. Plus, its presence is an odd comfort; no matter how alone she feels, there is the chance that her words are going somewhere and she will gratefully grab onto that hope as much as she can for as long as she can.

On the outskirts of Polis, Clarke shuts of the engine. She will leave the Rover here, just outside the ruined city; she doesn't want her fuel to run out before she's figured out how to manufacture more from an alternative source. Becca's lab will help with that. As for now, it stays.

Clarke shoulders her pack and grabs the radio, holding it under her arm as she heads into the leveled city. A light breeze brushes over stone and whistles through cracks in demolished walls, composing a haunting melody from the ruins of homes. Clarke's footsteps are a solitary sound she's grown accustomed to and she maneuvers through the city with ease. When she reaches the mound that used to be a tower, she is not surprised to find the bunker is still buried, but it's hard to look at nonetheless and she quickly passes it by.

She readjusts her grip on the radio, doing a thorough sweep of the city. Just like the camp and Mount Weather, there is nothing to be found beyond the continual rain of ash and broken rock. There are a few indications of a past, but they seem wayward now and out of place; a burned pan, melted tools. A piece of metal warped beyond recognition. Clarke gets turned around and finally she deigns to stop and rest, setting down her pack and using it as a makeshift seat. Balancing the radio on her knees, she takes out her canteen and stares out at the capital. She recalls the bustle of activity that used to fill the roadways. The sound of creaking wood and padding feet. Horse hooves on stone and the low hum of conversation. Life.

That is the something she aches for and she finds herself fighting tears. _It's not forever,_ she reminds herself. _It's only for now._ Even if the others don't return, she will find a way to exhume the bunker, whether that be with explosives or rigging up the Rover to dig it out stone by stone. If her friends don't come down, the people in the bunker will need _her._

Clarke rubs the tears from her eyes and looks up, gaze catching on a shape ahead.

A shape that . . . moves.

Alarm shoots through her, the echo of old instincts. She blinks and squints her eyes.

It must have been a mirage, a trick of the light. Maybe it was her imagination. She watches and waits, and after a few moments, Clarke shakes it off. No, nothing. She grabs her radio, and stands, snatching up her pack again. But still her gaze drifts back to that spot, between the piers of rock ahead, within the most condensed part of the city. Focus, she instructs herself. Perhaps she should just head back to the Rover. Put her time into producing some alternative fuel for it. But it's as if there's some force inside Clarke telling her to wait. To watch.

And sure enough, that movement comes again, like a wave of cloth. A blur of action she can't make out from the distance, accompanied by a whisper the wind seems to carry down, down the road.

Clarke stares, her heart skittering, her pulse jumping. No, not a mirage. Not her imagination. It is _something_ moving, just North and nestled in the ruins.

Her heart stutters and every joint of hers locks I place. Then the marble cracks, and she grabs her pack. She grips the radio tightly at her side before making a beeline for the ruins. It's probably nothing. It's probably nothing.

But from here it definitely seems like something, and that alone means everything.

The pack slaps painfully at her back. Sand climbs into her boots, but she doesn't care. Her thoughts dissipate. There is only her and the spot ahead and nothing draws her attention away until a high keening blares, resounding down the shattered walls. Clarke comes to a halt, a coat of sand dusting her from the waist down. Her eyes snap to the radio that delivers to her a whistle of static.

Her breath stops and for a beautiful moment, she thinks the Ark is trying to contact her. Or maybe it's the bunker that's found a way. She thinks it's _someone._

But nothing else happens. No one speaks. And after a few moments have passed, Clarke takes a slow step back, heart sinking as another possibility hits her.

After retracing her steps a few yards from the direction she came from, the keening quiets. The static dies, and Clarke feels the implication like a physical blow.

No one is contacting her.

She's traveling out of range.

Clarke looks at the radio, speaker secured to its side. Then her gaze drifts back to the ruins where that flash of movement had been. She could leave the radio here and come back for it, but the sand would damage the wiring. She doesn't know how to clean sand out of a radio panel and Clarke looks between the two, suddenly feeling very fragile, like any move at all would cause her to shatter.

What is chasing after that worth?

Is it worth all she has left?

How much is that, if it's anything at all?

With shaking hands, Clarke unhooks the speaker head and thumbs the receiver. "Bellamy," she says, her voice wavering ever so slightly. She does not take her eyes off the ruins.

"If you're hearing this, there's something I have to do . . . and it might just cost me losing the signal. So if you don't-if you don't hear from me again, I'm sorry." She blinks back tears. "Maybe it's for the best." She stops, words failing her. So close. She is so close to staying where she is, and maybe she would, if that strange echo of something didn't start. But it does and Clarke knows she must find out what it is.

"Keep them alive, Bellamy," she says as she starts walking. The static returns, drowning out whatever sound that lay ahead. "Bring yourself home."

The radio spits out that high keening once more, so loud she wonders if anything can be heard anymore."May we meet again," she manages, because it is all she can say. Then the keening explodes into a discordant sputter that climbs and crackles as Clarke's walk becomes a run. Sand kicks up in her wake as the ruins near. The radio seems to scream in protest.

Maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe he never even heard her.

But then there's the chance, however small, that he did. That they all did. And if that is the case, then it's already too late, and she will just have to live with dying to her friends a second time.

*************

He almost misses her radio call. They almost always occur in the late afternoon, but it's only mid-morning when he's returned to his room to change from a grease-stained shirt to a clean one and the radio crackles.

He stops, turned partially to the radio that lies by his bed, his drawer open.

At the tone she uses, he knows there is something wrong. _"Bellamy."_

His shoulders tense and he turns around, clean shirt forgotten. She's not supposed to radio yet. It's not her usual time.

He walks over to his bed and takes a seat. He dips his chin to the receiver. _"If you're hearing this, there's something I have to do . . . and it might just cost me losing the signal."_

He stiffens and looks from the floor to the radio, warning signs flashing in his mind. He doesn't like the sound of this. Not at all. "What-?" he breaks off abruptly, knowing she can't respond. What happened? What is it she has to do? And he knows this is Clarke, but can she possibly be less vague about it?

_"If you don't- if you don't hear from me again . . . I'm sorry."_

Her words shut him down, and Bellamy does not move. He is frozen, gaze fastened on the radio as he grapples to get a hold of his bearings. Habits die hard and as his survival instincts kick in, there's nothing he can do from up here but let the scenarios build in his mind. What does she mean, if he doesn't hear from her again? Where is she going? _What. Is. Happening?_

_"Maybe it's for the best."_

He cards a hand through his hair and shakes his head. "What are you doing, Clarke?" Why won't she tell him what it is she's _doing?_

Static starts, clouding her voice. _"Ke-ep them a-live, Bellamy."_

The static grows and Bellamy hits the speaker with the butt of his palm. "No," he murmurs, voice loud in the quiet of his room. He shakes the whole radio. "No, c'mon, don't do this, Clarke!"

_"Bring your- . . . self home."_

He shakes his head, anger igniting inside him as the sound of static reverberates off the walls. It feels as if the air has begun to leech from the room.

_"M . . . ay we me-et ag-ain."_

His fingers tighten over the speaker, as if he can trap her voice between his hands and keep it there, but he knows he can't. It's just static now.

His vision blurs and he waits, praying the signal is not lost. He tries to believe that she will find a way back, because she always has, even when the odds are stacked against her. _She will find a way back._

But a minute becomes an hour that becomes two, and still her voice does not appear again. The room remains quiet, other than the echo of static that never breaks and does not stop.


	6. Land Down Under

"It's day nine-hundred-and-ten, and sunlight has finally penetrated through the clouds."

As she speaks, Clarke watches the rays of light dance over her clothes, capturing motes of ash as flecks of golden dust. She closes her eyes and lifts a hand, letting the sun warm her palm. "I wish you were here to feel this, Bellamy. Fluorescent lights are a crude imitation of the real thing. But it's here again. Finally."

She reopens her eyes and drops her palm back to the rock she sits on. "I'm still trying to loosen the ground enough to actually sow the storage of seeds but it's proving challenging. It's ironic, I guess; planting seeds in ash." She grimaces. "I'd like there to be more for me to tell you. There are questions I'd like to ask you. Things you could really help me with, but I guess that'll have to wait.

"These updates have to be pretty boring by now but I think I need to give them maybe as much as you need to hear them. _If_ you're hearing them." Clarke sighs and tilts her head back, even though she's not really thinking about the sun any more. "I'm not giving up on that hope," she says. "It's why I do this. And it's why I'll keep doing this until I see you again. But until then . . ." She drifts off at the echo that sounds, of small, quiet feet brushing across the floor. They pause only when they reach the door.

Clarke looks over at the little girl who stands there, wide brown eyes gazing back from beneath a crooked black beanie much too big for her.

Clarke smirks, as if sharing some private joke with him. "We'll be here. Surviving."

*********

The silence is just as loud in space as it is on Earth, maybe even louder. When Bellamy first arrived on the Ark, the quiet was deafening, but he found connections that soothed his longing for the ground. There was the hum of the circadian lights he could imagine as the chimes of crickets. The undercurrent of electricity vibrating through the walls was like a distant river, the force echoing through the very ground, and for the first few weeks upon arrival, Bellamy slept on the floor.

But over time, that hum of the lights began to sound less like crickets and more like lights. The electrical current stopped sounding like a natural one. He sleeps in his cot now. And as Bellamy stares up at the metal ceiling like he's done for the last two and a half years, he realizes that he is starting to forget. The memories have begun to lose their edge.

He rubs his eyes with the palms of his hands and pulls in a deep breath. He tries not to think of what else has faded from him, like the color of Charlotte's eyes or the quiet fire in Lincoln's. The last words he spoke to Jasper. And thoughts like those inevitably lead back to one person, and his mind is once again on her. On her and her updates, all three-hundred-and-twenty-one of them, before the sudden, taut stretch of radio silence. Nine months since the signal went out and he's still received no word. Not a crackle of feed. Nothing. He knows better than to presume her dead, but he wonders. He worries.

Despite himself, he drudges up pieces of the conversations they once shared, disturbing the silt of memory. Their last conversation seems to hang on the air, and the words of Clarke's final update pierce the silence. _Keep them alive, Bellamy._

He tries to recall the inflection of her voice exactly as it was, as if he only spoke with her yesterday, a luxury he didn't fully realize he'd had until he'd lost it. Bring yourself home.

But he can't. Its clarity is gone along with the other memories, another loss among the casualties of survival.

_May we meet again._

With a resigned sigh, Bellamy snatches his blanket and spreads it out just beneath the small, circular window of his apartment. He stares out at the stars, imagining himself beneath them instead of immersed in them as he rests on a floor that has long since grown uncomfortable.

************

It is a tradition of theirs; every night, before Clarke tucks Madi in, she reads to her.

When she first found the little girl in the ruins of Polis, Clarke quickly learned that Madi only spoke Triangesleng, with only a couple English words dotting her vocabulary. So Clarke spoke the same, if only to offer the child a sense of familiarity. She didn't want Madi to feel uprooted from her past; new home, new world, new language. But after the first few months, Madi grew curious, and once she began sounding out new English words, Clarke pulled the stories from her past, composed them in pencil, and bound them together in books for her to learn from.

Clarke takes a seat on her makeshift cot and pulls out the box of their bound spines Madi keeps tucked safely beside her. The girl sits with her legs crossed, gazing at the books tentatively.

Clarke smiles. _"Which will em be tonight?"_ She asks.

On cue, Madi jumps and snatches up one in particular. Clarke doesn't even have to look to know which one she's nabbed. It is her favorite.

Clarke waits as Madi scoots over to make room for her before taking her place at her side, snuggled tightly into her.

It took hours before Madi would let her come close in Polis. It took almost the entire day before she would let Clarke close enough to touch her. But once she did, the girl clung there. She was a fighter. She was a survivor. But she had also been alone and craved the human interaction even more than Clarke did.

It was the first and only time since that Clarke has ever seen Madi cry.

Now, seated on their makeshift cot, Clarke adjusts her position and tucks her arm around Madi, who flips open the book's cover to a drawing of a child with long dark hair draping like a curtain down her back.

"Once upon a time there was a little girl, who was born in the stars inside of a steel cage." Clarke's gentle voice fills the room. "This cage held many others too, but they were given the freedom to move around. The freedom to live." She turns the page to another drawing of the child crawling into a small space, with only dim light to see by. "The little girl, though, was a secret. And she was kept safely hidden under the floor."

Madi listens intently, absorbing every word as she gazes fixedly on the images grazing her fingers and the written counterparts.

"But the little girl was not alone. She had a protector. Someone who would always be there for her, no matter what."

Madi turns the page again, to an image of a boy a bit older than the girl, with an unruly head of curls. He gestures with a finger pressed to his lips for her to be quiet as he told her a story.

"He took care of her. He helped her to be brave, and even though the little girl was scared at times, she never lost hope, because she had him."

Madi eagerly flips the page again and draws the book near, as if she can enter the story if only she can just get close enough to its words.

Clarke laughs softly and she tucks a wayward strand of hair behind Madi's ear. "Years passed, but still, he protected her." The next page reveals the girl grown now, on the cusp of womanhood. "Even after she was found out and the secret was revealed did he continue to fight for her. When she was plucked from the stars and sent to the ground, he followed after her."

 _"En em found her,"_ breathes Madi excitedly, exhilarated by Clarke's words, though she's heard them so much she must know them by heart.

Clarke nods. "That's right; he found her."

_"En em saved her."_

"Yeah, he did."

She shifts around until her wide brown eyes meet Clarke's. "Protector," she says, pointing to Clarke. _"Yu laik ai protector._ Like him."

Clarke tugs on her hat playfully and gives her a rueful smile. "I guess I am. Always."

Madi smiles back before her brows furrow in thought. Her gaze drifts back the book. _"Den_ what happened?"

Clarke shrugs and pulls her closer. "What do you hope happened?" She asks, because she wants Madi to believe in hope, and it is a testament to Madi's courage that she does. Even after the end of the world.

" _Emo're teina,"_ she says, tapping a finger over the drawing of the boy and the girl. "En happy." _They are together and they are happy._

Clarke smiles a sad smile and nods, letting Madi flip through the artwork again. While she paints a mental picture of the boy and the girl now in the same place, happy and strong, Clarke's chest grows heavy.

She doesn't see the point in telling Madi the rest of the story; that the boy has been returned to the steel cage and the girl is back beneath the floor.


	7. Test Drive

"All right, now, what is it we've learned? Walk me through it step-by-step."

Madi purses her lips until she's squashed her grin and stares at the stretch of dirt ahead, feigning seriousness. "I turn on the ignition."

Clarke analyzes her, one brow raised. "Then?"

"I check the panels."

"And after that?"

Madi pauses and then snaps her finger. "Seatbelt."

"Seatbelt should be the first thing that goes on you."

"You can't dock points until I've started moving. The seatbelt wouldn't make a difference in a stationary place."

Clarke shakes her head. It's her turn to purse her lips. "Okay, fine. Then what?"

Madi moves her hand onto the shift. "I put it into gear, _while_ my foot presses down the break," she adds for emphasis at Clarke's look.

They stare at each other. Clarke doesn't say anything. She waits, patient.

Madi studies her, eyes narrowing at her silence. "Right?"

Clarke shrugs. "Whatever you think. This is your test drive after-"

Madi floors it.

The rover lunges forward, wheels treading dirt underneath. Clarke's heart stumbles into her throat and she grabs onto the window bar as the vehicle bumbles forward. Parts of the ground ahead are pocked in green and Madi must see them as barrier points to avoid because she dodges them, twisting the wheel around with the voracity as if she's been doing this her whole life.

The short girl next to Clarke lets out a wallop of triumph, and she herself can't help but exhale her own laugh of exhilaration.

When Madi breaks, it's with the same kind of force, and it shoves them both back in their seats.

The girl turns to Clarke, hands still clutching the wheel, eyes burning with a fire's intensity. She sits there, breathing hard as if she's just run a mile as Clarke tries to covertly work out the sudden kink in her shoulder.

"I've wanted to do that since _forever,_ " says Madi, grinning.

Clarke brushes a loose lock of hair behind her ear. "Well, you certainly didn't waste the opportunity."

Madi's smile broadens. "Like I could."

Clarke laughs as she matches Madi's grin, warmth expanding inside her, a pride as voracious as the girl's need for speed.

Madi's gaze drifts back to the windshield, eyes searching. "Do you ever feel like some things were just born to fly?" she asks.

Clarke's eyes follow hers, out and up, to the single patch of blue in an otherwise still-grey sky.

"Yeah, otherwise birds wouldn't come with wings."

Madi smirks at her as she lets go of the wheel long enough to readjust her hat, disturbed in the drive. "You know what I mean. It must look so different from up there."

Clarke stares, seeing past the blue and through the stars, to a revolving metal ring she must believe is still there. "Different doesn't mean better."

She shrugs. "But your remember. It's not so bad, right?"

Not until you've seen the ground. Not until you've felt the grass. When you breathe air for the first time, instead of air that has been recycled over and over. "It could get lonely," she says. "But I didn't know it until I came down."

"Think I could do it?" Madi asks. "Live up there?"

For some reason, the thought makes the warmth inside Clarke go cold. She doesn't want to think of Madi in the sky, tethered to the stars along with her other hopes. "Only if there was room enough for the both of us," she says.

Madi tilts up her chin and wiggles her eyebrows at her, which doesn't have the same effect, hidden beneath her cap as they are. "Think I could fly a spacecraft one day?"

At that, Clarke reaches over and playfully tugs her hat down to her nose. "Let's just focus on the rover for now."

Madi smiles and pushes her cap back into place. "So what you're saying is . . . I need more practice?"

Clarke catches the mischief glinting in her eyes, dancing like embers. "Definitely. But only this time-"

Madi holds up a hand. "Don't worry, Clarke." She readjusts her harness by grabbing the straps and tightening them. "I remember."

**********

This is how the day goes.

In the dim-light of artificial morning, Bellamy wakes up from dreams of Earth. The burning pine of a campfire he thought was real only moments before is really just the fuel exhaust coming from the rocket propellant. He lies there for a couple seconds, wishing, just for a moment, that he could go back to Earth. Then to bury those thoughts again, he gets up. He dresses, and then he heads to the bridge. Most days he skips breakfast because his appetite for what he really wants hasn't been sated in so long that he's stopped having one for the same exact thing.

His boots and the hum of lights are the solitary sounds as he makes his way down the corridors until he's reached the circular room, walls lit up with switches and dials. Levers. He stays away from those.

Seated before the motherboard is Raven, brown ponytail swinging, hands tapping at screens as her eyes scans through material Bellamy couldn't wrap his own head around if he tried. And he has. Many times.

He stretches his arm, trying to work out a knot of muscle. "How're the oxygen tanks holding?"

"Morning to you, too," says Raven.

Bellamy takes the seat next to her. Last week the port side of the ring was struck by debris and punctured one of their oxygen tanks. According to Raven, they lost a few weeks' worth of air before Monty was able to spacewalk to seal it back up.

It was the closest any of them had come to risking their life in nearly four years.

"Seems fine. No leakage. As far as I can tell, Monty's sealant is holding."

Bellamy nods. "Good. If you need anyone to check on it-"

"You'll be the first to know if I do, but I'm not going to risk floating you just so you can have a little adrenaline rush."

Bellamy shakes his head. "That's not why-"

"Sure it is," she interrupts, spinning to face him, "It's why any of us would be glad to put on a space suit. You're not the only one who's bored, Bellamy."

Bellamy leans back in his chair. "I don't need the adrenaline." What he needs is to do something. To feel like he has a role other than the physical force alongside Raven's intellectual strength. For the last four years he's been floating, contributing where he could when he was needed, but he's found out months ago that isolation does not get easier with time. If anything he's run his routine so much he could trace it along the wear marks in the metal floor.

Raven has already returned to her screens, but he knows what she will say. She's said it every time he's felt like this, when the redundancy would reach its mind-numbing climax. Over the years, her words have gone from being an annoying reminder to something that strengthened his resolve.

_Just three more years, Bellamy._

_Just two more years, Bellamy._

"Just one more year, Bellamy."

He shuts his eyes. "I know."

Maybe that is why tension is building. Because they are getting closer.

_And I'll see my sister again._

He thinks about O during all the moments his mind isn't otherwise occupied with work, which has given him a lot of time to think of her. She won't be the seventeen-year-old he left behind anymore. She will be an adult by now, nearly the same age as he was when he first came to the ground.

The thought is a weird one.

"All the things we said we'd do for a little quiet, right?" Raven says. It's a joke cloaked in seriousness.

"That quiet usually included everyone I cared about," Bellamy replies with a doleful smirk, staring up at the metal ceiling. There is a dent in the center from where another piece of debris struck years before. He's gotten better at not thinking about certain things, but it's not as if he needs the reminder. It dawns on him alongside the circadian lights each morning.

"Well, the anticipation only gets worse from here."

He glances at Raven. "Thanks."

A smile toys at her lips, the sad one she wears as if it is a happy one. "Things could be worse, Blake. We could be losing oxygen and not have a sealant cohesive enough to work."

This is a sort of game between them that they play for when the frustration gets to be too much, mediating their tempers at the current situation by being grateful they aren't facing a poorer one. "We could be out of fuel, drifting above the Earth while never being able to land."

Raven shrugs. "We could be dead."

"Or we could be the only humans left alive."

His words seem to bounce around in the sudden quiet. Raven does not try to out-could him. She probably can't think of anything worse anyway. "They're still down there, Bellamy," she says, as softly as only Raven can.

Bellamy cards a hand through his hair. "But we can't know that yet. Not for sure." He looks at her, and he's scared to say it out loud, but he has to, because however much he hates it, it is a possibility. "Say everything goes according to plan. What if, when we go back, there's nobody there waiting for us?"

One thing about Raven: she doesn't sugarcoat. "Then it'll be the ring just with a lot more space," she says, shrugging. "That would be the reality. But it's not yet, and it won't help any of us to expect it to be the one we come home to. So for now, I suggest you do your rounds. See if Monty has fixed the comms. And get something to eat."

Bellamy stands. "Any idea what we're having?"

Raven's reply to him is an unamused look, and Bellamy leaves the bridge feeling a fraction more relieved than he did upon arriving.

***********

When he is not working, he is in the training room.

That is what they call it, anyway. It's really just an old storage chamber with enough room to include the rubber dummy Raven created by pulling padding together and securing it around a steel beam. The weights aren't so much weights as they are metal scraps.

But it's enough, and that is where Bellamy can most often be found, hands fisted, knuckles connecting to the dummy over and over again.

He can still hear Lincoln's voice in his head, telling him where to place his feet, how to hold his grounder ghosts Bellamy through the training again, until his hair is damp and his temples are dripping with sweat. He won't return home weaker than he was when he left it. It's also satisfying, having something to put everything into. He'll have to ask Raven for some more padding, soon.

After a few deep breaths, Bellamy sidles over to the weights. He lies down on a metal bench and removes the steel bar. He stares up at the ceiling as he works, forcing every remnant of frustration into hoisting the bar up again and again.

_"Don't think too much, or your opponent will see your thoughts in your actions. Fighting does not mean letting your emotions rule. That's how you lose."_

Lincoln's words seem to echo in the stillness, far away, from a different training room.

_"Don't let emotion get the upper hand. Surviving means keeping your head clear."_

"You have to use this, too." Her voice cuts in swiftly, beckoned by a word. That's usually how it goes, and Bellamy pauses a moment before hooking the bar back over his head. His chest burns. His eyes sting from where sweat has dripped into them.

He sits up stiffly, breathing hard, and wipes his face with the scrap of towel he brought with him. His ration of water is gone in a few gulps. Once his heart rate has calmed, Bellamy stands. He needs to check back in with Monty.

_" . . . -today. . . . We're . . ."_

Bellamy glances up. _Comms are back online,_ he thinks, though to the sound of it, they'll need a bit more tuning. On sore legs he leaves the training room behind and enters the corridor. He stops before the next door and turns to a panel secured on the wall. Beneath a speaker is a square button and he presses it. "Comms are up, Raven. Do you read me?"

He waits, expecting some remark.

_"That's . . . -Anyway. The ground is . . . almost ready."_

Bellamy's eyes lock on the panel with sudden, rapt attention. For the first time in a while, all the noise inside him seems to go quiet, silenced by the shock that streaks through him. Because it can't be.

_". . . Just one more year."_

But of course it is.

His fingers loosen, and the towel drifts to the floor.


	8. Fade Away

Clarke is alive.

It was stupid of Bellamy to ever doubt it, really. But of course, a big part of him never let go of that hope. Couldn't. He'd already thought her dead once before, and he wasn't willing to accept that so hastily again. Yet whenever that fear struck its usual cord, Bellamy would remind himself of the many times he buried her too quickly. And though the years have tried that hope, they never extinguished it. Now he's grateful for holding on, because she's alive.

And it is that realization that has Bellamy suddenly moving, his sore muscles forgotten. He sprints, boots slamming against the grate flooring, heart pounding like a jackhammer in his chest.

She's alive.

"Raven?" he's calling before he's even reached the bridge, an old fire back in his blood.

She's still at the motherboard, but she's standing, eyes pinned to the screen. "I know," she says. "I hear her." There's a smile in her words, but it's drowned out by her focus.

Bellamy doesn't feel himself move, but he's suddenly standing beside Raven and pressing down the button the larger speaker head. "Clarke?" he asks. It's the first time he's said her name aloud in months. "Clarke, can you hear me?"

The static breaks.

_"We're . . . heading back to Polis later. Mad-has gotten the hang of the rover, so-will be driving part way."_

Raven shakes her head and sighs. "She can't."

All the frustration Bellamy left in the training room comes screaming back and he locks it inside of him, until it is a fist over his heart. But some anger still manages to leak through. His hands knot until his fingers clip his palms. "Why am I not surprised?" He doesn't take his eyes off the motherboard's speaker head, afraid that if he does, her voice will disappear again.

"Wait," Bellamy risks a glance at Raven. _"'We'?"_

That's when the others begin to filter in, interrupting. First it's Monty and Harper, already asking questions that Bellamy can't think clearly enough to answer.

"That's her, right?" Monty exhales something short of a laugh. Harper smiles as he pulls her into an embrace. "She's alive."

"I must've tapped into the right frequency when I while repairing the comms," he says.

Then Murphy enters with Emori, and even his usual could expression is a look of surprise.

"Does this mean the radio works?" asks Harper, but Bellamy holds up a hand. "Everybody, hold on. Raven," he looks at her, and she reads his message with ease, as if he's spoken the words out loud. He can't think beyond the sound of her voice and the chorus of she's alive echoing in his head.

"The feed is still one-way." says Raven, hands blurring over the keyboards. "The rest I might be able to figure out if everyone could just be quiet for a minute."

_" . . . -lants are starting to appear again. The crops we've . . . harvested are small, but-"_

"What does she mean by 'we?" Monty's surprised voice repeats Bellamy's question.

Everyone shares a glance and for a moment, there is silence.

"Isn't it obvious?" asks Murphy. "She's lost it."

Bellamy is already shaking his head, though the same notion had entered his mind only moments before. He flicks it away like a bug. "No, that's not what happened."

"Oh, come on, it was bound to at some point." Murphy shrugs. "But at least we know she's alive."

"That's not what happened!" Bellamy says again, louder. "Maybe it means she got the others out of the shelter."

"A year early? They'd be roasted, Bellamy."

"Maybe not."

Murphy shoves his hands into his pockets. "Judging by the radiation levels-"

It is Raven's turn to hold up her hands. "Enough! Murphy, you're not helping, though . . ." she shares a look with Bellamy, and though he knows she can clearly see his wish for him to tell her otherwise, Raven won't cushion the truth, no matter how far the fall might be. "Radiation levels are still high. Exposure could be fatal."

A grim look crosses Murphy's face. "It's not like I _want_ to be right about it."

"That doesn't mean she's lost it," says Bellamy, his jaw set. And even if she has, it's still better than her being dead. It's a selfish thought, but he has it nonetheless.

Murphy is smart, because he knows not to say anything else.

"What I most want to know is why tapping into another of our frequencies would re-establish the radio feed," says Raven. "The connection was first severed from her end, right?" She looks at Bellamy.

He clenches his jaw around his anger. Or maybe it's desperation. Probably both. "Yeah. She warned me that she might break the connection because she was going out of range."

"So why now?" mumbles Raven, mostly to herself. She swings around to another part of the motherboard. "Why _this_ frequency?"

"Maybe she altered it," says Monty, coming to stand on the other side of Raven, "and only now we've switched to the same one."

"Yeah, maybe, with a decent radio. But not her box of bolts."

"What about Becca's lab?" Belly asks, attention torn between Raven and the static emanating from the speaker in broken pieces. "Could she have figured out how to work the radio there? Or restore it?"

It's Monty who shakes his head, fist under chin in thought. "Wouldn't matter. The lab's radio and Clarke's may be one and the same. Since the Ark was constructed, frequencies were coded. Plus, taking the amount of radiation into account, it doesn't make sense. We've tried the other frequencies." He looks at Bellamy. "You checked them for months after the connection went dead."

Bellamy meets his gaze pointedly but says nothing. It might not be something he's shared, but that doesn't mean it's escaped the rest of the group's notice. He's not as good as keeping secrets as he once was.

"So for us lesser-known technicians, mind explaining what this means?" Murphy asks, the irritation clear in his voice, along with impatience. He wants to know too.

Raven takes the torch. "Frequencies now, between the Ark and other stations are coded, meaning they have to be identical. So, for Clarke's frequency to match ours now, she'd essentially have to be emitting an entirely new frequency that aligned with ours, which means equipment that, last I checked, the end of the world didn't provide."

"So how'd our apocalyptic princess come by this new frequency?"

Raven presses her hands to her temples in frustration. "I don't know! Like Monty said, it shouldn't make sense. It could be bouncing off something else, but in order for that to happen, that something would have to be active. This doesn't…" she stills, eyes locked on the screen. Bellamy can feel the shift in the air, like tectonic plates beneath his feet. Suddenly his torn attention joins, and it all centers on Raven. "What is it?"

"Her frequency hasn't changed. It's just on another's that Monty tapped into, without the radiation levels to interfere with its transmitting."

"Another frequency outside of the irradiated zone?" Bellamy asks, not really understanding. "That would be the whole world, and we're the only ones out here."

"Maybe not," mumbles Raven, brow creased, hands stilled over the computer board.

A coldness creeps into Bellamy and though he doesn't want to ask, he has to. "What?"

Raven shuts her eyes for a moment before turning to them all. "When Becca went to space to create Nightbloods, she needed to be able to run tests on someone to make sure that it would work, so she used subjects she had cryogenically frozen."

Bellamy stares with wide eyes, trying to grasp what it is Raven is telling him. Clarke's voice seems farther away. He shakes his head. "Why? Who were they?"

Raven hesitates. "Just . . . criminals."

That silence dominates the room again, like a blast of cold air.

"Of course," quips Murphy.

"Criminals," Bellamy repeats. And then he scoffs in quiet disbelief and finds himself echoing Murphy; of course there is another problem. Of course it was stupid to assume there lay peace in the stars.

"So what you're saying," he speaks slowly, "is that we're intercepting the frequency of a ship containing cryogenically frozen criminals?"

"Who's to say they're still frozen?" Proffers Murphy unhelpfully. "Maybe now they're just a bunch of pissed-off delinquents looking to settle old scores." He rolls his eyes, sarcasm dripping from his words. "Now where have we heard that one before?"

"Wait, just . . . hold on," Bellamy holds up a hand to silence Murphy. He looks back at Raven. " _If_ that is true and we really are intercepting _their_ frequency, why are we hearing Clarke?"

Raven purses her lips. She stares back at Bellamy, letting him put the pieces together. It hits him in a cold blast. "Because that's where her feed is going," he realizes. He shuts his eyes. "We can hear her because they can."

"But . . ." Monty pipes up, sounding uncertain, "doesn't that also mean they're -"

"Within a three-thousand-mile radius?" finishes Raven before nodding. "Yeah, it does."

Bellamy glances between the two, losing the exchange of conversation they continue without words. "And so that means we should . . . ?"

Raven looks at him, slender brows furrowed, her expression grim. "We need to go dark."

For the first time in one-thousand, four-hundred and sixty-four days, Bellamy's tactical instincts kick into gear. "If they're a threat, we should be ready for an attack."

"Right, because it's not like we don't have any weapons," says Murphy, cutting him a dour look. "C'mon, Bellamy. Do you really expect us to charge at them with Monty's wrenches and screwdrivers?"

Bellamy blinks back his glare. "We could do _something."_ He looks at Monty. "Didn't you stop the grounders when you launched the dropship and burned half their army?" He looks at Raven. "Weren't you the one who once made a bomb out of some gun powder and a keg?" A lifetime ago.

But she shakes her head. "Murphy's right," she says. Four years, and it's still a surprising thing to hear from their mechanic. She pins her attention on Bellamy. "Look at us. It's hard enough just trying to keep ourselves alive without also plotting battle strategies. We power down the ship and we wait. If they spot us, then we'll make a plan of defense, but like Murphy said, they may not even be awake."

"And if they are?" Asks Bellamy. "What if the nightblood worked? There's nothing keeping them from going down there. Clarke-"

"Is more than capable of taking care of herself, just like we have to." She turns away from him and refocuses on the rest of the group. "Monty, you're up. I need you to-"

"Manually power down the generator, got it." No less has he spoken it that Monty is gone, slipping through the door and out of sight. His footsteps disappear down the corridor.

"What about the rest of us?" Asks Bellamy, walking over to her until he's practically hovering, waiting for her to tell him what she needs him to do, because he needs to do something.

But Raven just glances at him from over the control board. "The rest of you can just sit tight. Maybe grab some blankets if you don't like the cold."

The radio crackles and both of them snap to attention. _" . . . Took the Rover a ways S...-outh before hitting the r...ver. Or what us...d to be a river…"_

A lance of pain shoots through Bellamy's chest and his eyes bore into the radio. He tries not to think of Clarke down there, vulnerable and exposed. He tries not to think of her words being listened to by someone else, and fails.

"Raven . . ." It's a question and a plea folded into one.

The brunette looks up, her dark gaze both sad and unrelenting. She grits her teeth.

There are times when this woman says the wrong thing, and times when she's the only one who knows what to say at all.

Today is the latter.

"It's because of Clarke that we're able to know what to do here," she tells him softly.

Something in him loosens. He let's out a quiet sigh, recalling what Clarke told him, a hand pressing to his chest. A fingertip brushing against his temple. _"You have to use this, too."_

Raven flips open a metal pad where a transparent button lies. She glances first at Bellamy before removing her hand; a silent offer to him.

At least it's not a lever.

Bellamy swallows tightly before placing two fingers over the button. They linger there, limp and heavy. "She's still saving us," he whispers.

Raven gives him a small smile, a little sad, a lot proud. "She's still saving us," she agrees.

And with a final deep breath, he presses down, and they both listen as the static of Clarke's voice fades away.


	9. Waiting on the Stars

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The reference at the end of this chapter caught my eye in another fic I read somewhere, so I saw this as a good opportunity to reflect back on that scene in season 5. Tried to find the fic to make sure I didn't use the same words verbatim, which I don't think I did, but I still wanted to make this statement.

The whole universe seems to hold its breath. It appears to Bellamy as though the light from outside the windows has gone dim, like the stars themselves wish to keep their distance. The only sounds are the echo of his own breathing. The pound of his heart. The clips of hushed voices shared between Emori and Murphy, Monty and Harper. They’ve clustered around the bridge, sitting with their backs to the metal wall, waiting. 

Bellamy’s hands strangle the blanket over his knees. He’s so _tired_ of waiting.

“How long?” he asks Raven quietly. She sits beside him, head rested back, eyes closed. He knows her well enough to tell that she isn’t really asleep; the crease between her brows is still there.

Without opening her eyes, she says, “We’ll check again in a few hours.”

He thinks about the question he wants to ask, but doesn’t know if he wants the answer to. But it’s as though Raven reads his mind from behind closed lids, because she answers it. 

“Clarke’s feed . . . it will act as a warning from now on.”

Bellamy grits his teeth. He wonders what she would think if she knew that her talk about travels in the Rover and what she’s found to survive on today are now alarms of another enemy. 

She wouldn’t be happy, that much he’s certain. 

“Do you think Murphy was right?” Bellamy asks quietly, he almost isn’t sure if he’s really asked the question aloud. He looks at Raven. “If the bunker hasn’t been opened . . . Do you really think someone else is down there with her?”

Raven opens her eyes and looks at him. He’s adjusted to the dark enough to see her somewhat clearly, the light emanating from outside the windows still allowing them to make sense of one another. “We thought we were the last people in space, but we’re not. Is it really fair to make the same assumption about the ground?”

Bellamy swallows and nods, relief flooding him. It’s almost a happy thought, that Clarke’s found someone. He replays in his head what broken words he’d manage to hear from her feed. She didn’t _sound_ hopeless. She sounded . . . normal. Wistful. Almost content. 

“And the prison ship?” he asks. “We need to make a plan for that. We can’t just sit back for another year.”

Raven sighs, the sound filling up the space. “I don’t know yet.”

“Do you think trying to get in contact with them might be possible?”

His words are not hard to be heard by everyone, and Bellamy can sense the air go taut with tension. 

“We didn’t come this far to survive just to throw it away by trying to make friends with space criminals,” Murphy says, an audible edge in his voice. “It’s a _prison ship,_ Bellamy. On what level does that sound like a good idea to you?”

“You think it’s anymore unrealistic than thinking we can keep this up for another year?” Bellamy asks. “How is Monty going to keep the algae farm going if we have to go dark every few hours? How is Raven going to work on the radio if she has no live feed to work _with?_ ” he shakes his head. “For all we know, they’ve already seen us. These are precautionary measures at best. This isn’t a solution.”

“Then what’s the plan?” Murphy asks, goading. “Fix the radio and give them a call? Bond over our experiences of unjust imprisonment?”

“And what if that _is_ their story?” he asks. “We weren’t _sent_ to the ground; we were _sentenced._ ” Not that Bellamy is eager to risk their lives on such a hope. He knows it's a fleeting one.

“Correction number one,” Murphy says, lifting a finger. “The _rest_ of us were. Me, Monty, Harper, and Clarke. Correction number two,” he lifts a second finger, _"You_ were technically the only one who actually did what he was charged for.”

“Murphy,” Raven snaps.

“What?” he asks. “I don’t mean to push old buttons, but it’s true. The rest of us were delinquents on the Ark. You guys got your criminal badge only _after_ you came to the ground.”

Bellamy looks at his friend, sitting a few yards away, his arm wrapped around Emori. There is a fire in his eyes, a restlessness he feels in his own soul. “What’s your point, Murphy?” 

“My point is that I highly doubt our story is a popular phenomenon in space. We were thrown off the Ark because we were running out of air. But that prison ship was _built_ for criminals, whose crimes not only put them in orbit, but also on ice. Doesn’t exactly scream ‘misunderstood juvenile convicts’ to me.”

Bellamy pulls in a deep breath, looking past Murphy to the window beyond. He sees nothing but darkness with pinpricks of light, black ink spilling down a canvas. “All right,” he says. “Do we have any other ideas?” 

“Take them by surprise,” Murphy proffers.

“Weren’t you just saying how we weren’t prepared?” Monty pipes in for the first time. “Or are my wrenches and screwdrivers suddenly looking a lot more like weapons now?”

Murphy shrugs, raising a hand palm up in dismissal. “That was before I found us all sitting in the dark waiting to be ambushed. I don’t want to be caught off-guard when they’ve thawed.” 

“Are you suggesting we _attack_ the ship?” asks Echo. 

“Why not?” he challenges. “An hour ago, Bellamy was about ready to launch the whole Ring back to the ground himself.”

“Well for one, we don’t even know its location,” Echo points out, looking as tired as Bellamy feels.

“You’d have to power everything back up to fall on the ship’s radar,” Raven says. 

“Is it possible we already have?” Bellamy asks, an unsettling feeling unfurling like marbles in his chest. 

Raven runs a hand across the crown of her head. “Maybe. We can’t know for sure.”

“Until they appear one day at our door,” finishes Murphy. “I’d rather not wait around for that.” He makes a sound of annoyance. “We were unprepared when we first got to the ground because we didn’t know what we were dealing with. But here . . . space . . .” he looks at each of them, gaze settling on Bellamy. “This is what most of us know.”

“And they don’t?” murmurs Harper. She’s quiet; she always has been. But Harper Mcintyre is not timid. There’s a bold streak in her that doesn’t need to be loud to be heard.

“Not if they’ve been popsicles for most of it. If they’re from Becca’s time, they’ve been here for, what, hundreds of years? But they haven’t been awake for them. They have no idea what’s happened.” He shrugs a shoulder, as though it is obvious. “We have the upper hand.”

“We _think_ we have the upper hand,” says Raven. “We don’t know what kind of supplies they have. If there are weapons-”

“Yeah, about that. Why would they put weapons on a prison ship with only prisoners?” he fires at her. 

“All of that is a guess,” Bellamy interjects, trying to smother the rising tension he feels growing on the air. “First we’d have to get on the ship, and if we did, we’d be going in blind.” 

“What if they have a way to get down to the ground sooner?” says Monty, “Including the nightblood equation. Becca must’ve implemented a deactivation time that was set for after the death wave.” He leans forward. “What was the point of ever sending them into space if there was no intention of ever having them land? It doesn’t make any sense.”

He’s right. It doesn’t.

Bellamy leans his weight against the wall, too many thoughts running haphazardly through his mind. It’s been years since he’s been so on edge, his attention locking on every movement, every sound. Old habits of strategies run their course in his head, but it just feels like a child’s game. He knows there is no smart plan. Has there ever been one? 

He clenches and unclenches his hands, trying not to picture Clarke watching a ship that’s not theirs land on the ground. He tries not to imagine what might follow. 

“What should we do, Bellamy?” asks Monty, after a long moment of united silence.

Bellamy lifts his head to find them all looking at him. Expectant. Waiting. There is no chancellor on this ring; Bellamy is not the only leader here. But he's found himself in this position more than once, with people looking to him to tell them what to do. It reminds him of when he last found himself in this position, a lifetime ago, and with the same absence of a friend he feels now. He remembers what those choices cost him. The lives they cost others. 

Four years haven't changed that. The rest of his life will never change that.

Bellamy runs over their limited options, trying to gauge the risk on the equally-limited information they have. He meets each of their gazes in turn. “Raven and Echo are right; making a plan of offense without having a clear idea of what it is we’re even up against is a dumb idea. We’ll keep this up for a few more days. Get as much information as we can. We’ll each take watch. Raven, can you set up some sort of alarm system to warn us if anything comes within a certain radius?” 

Raven raises a brow, as if insulted by the question. “Give me an hour.” 

He nods.

“So we’re just going with the waiting plan.” says Murphy. It’s not a question.

Sudden tiredness hangs like weights from Bellamy’s shoulders, but he won’t rest. Not yet. He is wide awake with worries. 

He doesn’t know how he could’ve once believed that there was safety in space. As if the stars don’t hold their own secrets. Disaster has followed them everywhere, from the nebulous above to the tortured ground below. This is no different. 

A part of him wonders if it ever will be. 

“We know one thing,” he says, returning his focus to the problem at hand. “There’s six of us. Everyone aboard that ship could be out of cryo sleep, and if they are, I’m not about to try and take them on. It’s reasonable to assume that someone must be awake if they’re only now emitting a frequency.” Bellamy grimaces at the lack of promise his words seem to hold. “We’ll take it one thing at a time.”

Murphy wears his disapproval openly, like the disgruntled teenager he had once been. “Great,” he muses, his sarcasm cloying the small space. “Maybe after everything is over we’ll all head to the ground and sing Kumbaya together.”  
_______________________

“It’s day one-thousand-four-hundred-and-eighty-one, and-” 

“Eighty,” Madi amends from her spot on the floor.

Clarke casts her a look and smirks. Madi is working knots in thick chords of fur for a blanket, sitting cross-legged in their small home. The open windows carry in a cool breeze. Too soon it will be much colder. Already does the wind hold in it the promise of winter, maybe the first real winter since the death wave. 

For some reason, the idea makes Clarke grow cold on the inside, too. 

She tightens her hand over the radio. “Right. Day one-thousand-four-hundred-and- _eighty._ Thank you, Madi.” Clarke doesn’t have to look to know the young girl is smiling. “Nothing has changed in the last 24-hours. We’re getting some things ready for the colder months ahead. Irradiated snow. Now that ought to be interesting.” She tries to make it light, but there is a heaviness in her. It’s been there for weeks. Perhaps even years. “I’d imagine you’re all over Monty’s algae by now. Can’t say I blame you. And here I thought what we were living on was impressive.”

She lifts her finger from the button and lets the silence fill up the room. There is only the hush of fur on wood behind the battle of Clarke’s own thoughts. She won’t speak the words out loud, but she is scared. 

Scared, because five years have almost passed.

Scared, because she might soon see her friends again.

Scared, because perhaps she has come this far only to learn that they never made it to begin with.

“Less than a year to go.”

Clarke pulls in a shaky breath, trying to keep her thoughts from turning down starless tunnels. _They’re alive,_ she tells herself. 

She still has hope, because she is still breathing.


	10. Only Choice

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I really like this chapter. I hope you guys do, too. Reviews keep me writing this so please let me know your thoughts.

The floor should be worn with his pacing, the metal grating sanded by the soles of his shoes. He’s surely walked it enough, miles of it, dangling in the stars. He’s taken thousands of steps suspended over the earth, but their destination is always the starting point. He always returns to this same place before the same window overlooking the same broken planet.

Again, and again, and _again._

The sight sets his teeth on edge, and prompts the inevitable question that he never can seem to make leave him alone. 

_Will we ever make it back?_

And like every time before, he tries to banish it as quickly as it comes, burying it underneath the weight of better things.  
_We will make it,_ he tells himself, _because we have to._

They haven’t survived all this to stop now. And he didn’t come this far only to leave Clarke to believe they’d never made it at all. 

Bellamy tries not to think how the day-by-day strategy has stretched into weeks, and they are no closer to a plan than they were then. 15 days ago, they chose to reboot everything, with no change. The waiting game, as Murphy put it, no longer seems like a strategy, but their only option. Wait, until something changes. Or wait until Raven’s new radar system catches something. 

Either way, it leaves him in the same place, and it is almost enough to have him tearing out his hair. 

“You look out that window as though earth is going somewhere.”

Bellamy looks over his shoulder at Raven, her eyes pinned on the screen before her. She hasn’t stopped looking at them. Despite installing her system with alarms that will alert them to any frequency, she still doesn’t want to risk missing something.

Bellamy can’t blame her. He is here too, after all.

“I’m not worried about the planet going anywhere,” he says.

Raven looks up at him. Her eyes don’t have to search much to read the unspoken words. _I’m afraid that we will._

She smirks half-heartedly. Or maybe it’s a frown. Sometimes it is hard to tell; some days their joking has lost its own gravity, becoming as dry as the dust on the earth. It’s left Bellamy to wonder if they’re all doomed to leave the ring with a humor like Murphy’s. 

“It just . . . takes time,” Raven says, an edge in her words, because she’s repeated them at least twice in the last 48-hours. 

“But we can’t power down again,” Bellamy says. “Not if we have to.”

Raven has told him of the problem the first time they rebooted the ring and saw the fuel gauge right after. Rebooting costs fuel they don’t have, and to continue doing so is to potentially lose the only fuel they have left to get back to the ground.

Raven’s silence is answer enough, and Bellamy returns his gaze to the window so he doesn’t say exactly what he wants to. He tries to think of more promising things, but his mind turns back to Clarke’s most recent call, and the information he could glean from it. He’s lost count of the days, the number butchered by the poor connection they’ve been unable to improve. 

_“Right, day one-thou- . . . -eighty. Thank you, M . . . -adi.”_

_Madi._

Questions pummel him without answer. The who, the what. The when. The how. They roll into a stream of question marks Bellamy finds himself turning frequently towards, as though it is a puzzle he is capable of solving from here. 

With an aggravated sigh, he mentally replays the rest of the message, hinging on her last few words, the only ones that came through clear. 

_“Less than a year to go.”_

Bellamy crosses his arms and leans against the wall, staring out the window as though he can see all the way to the ground, to a girl with a radio somewhere far below. 

It’s instantly followed by thoughts of his sister in the earth, buried but alive, tucked beneath the world’s floor. 

_It just takes time._

Bellamy doesn’t yet voice the question he really wants to ask, the one that leaves him waking in the middle of the night to a shirt soaked in sweat and a heart rate higher than the ceiling. 

_What happens when we’ve run out of that, too?_

*************

Madi insisted on bringing the radio.

Clarke was initially against it. Why, exactly, she still doesn’t know. Maybe she finds it weird. Sadistic, in a way, and perhaps even a little eerie.  
But at the chance, the possibility of there being anyone listening on the other side, Madi wanted them to be included in today.

Something in Clarke’s chest tightens. 

_The other side._

She shakes the thought off, clutching the radio in her hand, finger pressed to the receiver. “All right, go over the three rules for me again,” says Clarke, watching the young girl with wary eyes. 

Madi lifts her gaze to the blue sky above, an act she does any time she is trying to concentrate or recall something. “Always keep it pointed to the ground when you’re not using it. Never point it at a person. Keep your finger out of the trigger guard until you intend to actually shoot.” Her contemplative expression turns proud.

Clarke smirks. She places a hand endearingly on Madi’s head. “Good, now hold it a little higher.” it reminds her of a different time, so long ago, when she found herself in a bunker alongside the man who she hopes is listening now. 

_“So I just hold it on my shoulder?”_

_“Yeah . . . a little higher.”_

“I still think the bear traps work better,” Madi says somberly. “I mean, don’t you wonder if we’ll ever need to, you know, . . . save what we have? Just in case?”  
It takes a moment for Clarke to understand her meaning, and a cold knot appears in her chest. Save what they have. Save the bullets. 

_Just in case._

But Clarke is quick to shake her head. To dismiss that knot as an echo of old fears. “There’s no one left to fight anymore,” she says softly. 

**********

The alarm comes in the middle of the night.

The shrill cry yanks Bellamy from his nightmare. He rushes from his room, having slept with his shoes on. He doesn’t change from his sodden shirt to a dry one. Bellamy just runs, sprinting down the corridors, the echo of the alarm like flashes of red in his mind. Those old instincts slam back into place like armor. 

Bellamy turns the corner onto the bridge, taking in the rest of those gathered. “Where is it?” He asks Raven, who is at her usual spot behind the screens. But this time she is standing, eyes jumping between monitors, fingers flying across keyboards. Three strides later, he is standing next to her. 

“Caught the signal a thousand miles Northwest of our position,” she says.

“And?” 

“And _nothing._ I’m tracking the problem. You guys make the call.” 

“Raven-”

_“All right. Go over the rules for me again.”_

Bellamy stops. His attention snaps to the voice over the comms. “They’re clear.” He whispers. He looks back to Raven, a sinking feeling collecting in his chest. He knows before he even asks. “Raven, why is-”

“Because the ship is getting closer,” she deadpans.

Coldness slams into him, all other thoughts clamoring from his mind. Bellamy takes a survey of the room, making sure everyone is accounted for. 

_“Always keep it pointed to the ground when you’re not using it.”_ The voice over the comm continues, only this time it is different, because this voice is not Clarke’s.

Bellamy looks overhead, the roar inside him subsiding for a moment. The voice sounds young. Feminine. It inexplicably has Bellamy thinking of Octavia. 

_“Never point it at a person. Keep your finger out of the trigger guard until you intend to actually shoot.”_

So this is Madi. 

“Nine-hundred miles Northwest and closing,” Raven chimes. 

Bellamy’s attention narrows to this small focal point, no greater than the dot that has appeared on Raven’s radar. 

“Bellamy, what do we do?” asks Echo. 

“If we go dark once more, it might cost us the last of our fuel,” says Monty, his eyes wide with fear. “Same scenario if we try to outrun them.” 

Bellamy’s mind races. Sweat has started to dampen his shirt once more. “And if we _do_ go dark, is there another way of getting back? An alternative source of power we could use?”

Momentary silence.

“We won’t know until we have to find one,” Monty says softly. 

Bellamy looks between Monty and Raven. He casts a glance out the window to a threat he cannot yet see. “What happens if we stay put, stay powered, and they dock?”

Murphy takes a step forward in protest. “Bellamy, you can’t-”

Bellamy holds up a hand. “What happens?” he repeats. “Can we barricade them? Control points of entry?”

Raven shakes her head in frustration. “I can control the points of entry by encoding them manually, but those can be overridden, depending on what kind of systems operator they have. If they even have one at all.”

“So if they dock, we _might_ be able to keep them in one place,” reiterates Bellamy. “If not, we shut down, and potentially lose our only known chance to return to the ground?”

Murphy slams a hand against the wall. “Just _once_ I would like to have promising odds!”

“Seven-hundred miles Northwest,” is Raven’s response.

 _“I still think the bear traps work better,”_ chimes the young voice. Madi’s voice.

Bellamy tries to block it all out, forcing himself to think. To consider their only choices.

_‘Only choice.’ Also an oxymoron, by the way._

He looks between the monitor, staring at the solitary blip blinking across the screen. He does a mental inventory of weapons, considering, for a moment, Monty’s wrenches and screwdrivers.

Murphy was right; there are no promising odds. 

_“I mean, don’t you wonder if we’ll ever need to, you know, . . . save what we have? Just in case?”_

“Six-hundred miles.” Raven looks up at him, the worry in her eyes louder than anything else. “Bellamy, we’re down to minutes. What do we do?”

What do we do?

_What do we do?_

Bellamy stares at the small, seemingly innocuous dot on the screen, watching it move with unblinking eyes and an anger that has him clenching his fists tight. 

His earlier thoughts repeat themselves. No, they haven’t endured everything on the ground just to die in the stars. They haven’t done all they did for it to end here. 

Bellamy is not done.

 _None_ of them are. 

“Three hundred miles,” whispers Raven.

Bellamy raises his gaze to her, then to the others, searching for an answer he won’t find. A solution that is not within their options. 

Finally, his eyes settle on Monty’s. Heart heavy as lead, Bellamy gives him a small nod, just as Clarke’s voice spills over the comm, confident and at ease. 

_“There’s no one left to fight anymore.”_


	11. Victories

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it's taken so long to update some stories! Writer's block. This one is also coming to an end, so I'll try to wrap it up in the next two chapters or so. :) I have another fic I was thinking of posting here that's pretty much already complete, if anyone is interested in reading that. It's about what would've happened had both Clarke and Bellamy stayed on the ark rather than getting on the dropship in season 1. Thank you all for reading!

She holds the radio with tight fingers, the weight of the receiver oddly heavy in her palm. It's become that way it seems, growing heavier and heavier with each passing year, the weight of anticipation like a stone in her hand today.

Because today is arrival day.

And they are not here.

She lifts the receiver to her lips. "Day one-thousand, eight-hundred, and twenty-six. Guess you know what makes this one special." Clarke pauses, the lightness in her voice falling under the weight of her words. She swallows. "But since when do we ever make it on time? Trust me, if anything's certain, it's the delays. I'm sure Raven and Monty are doing all they can. If something's happened . . ." she clenches her teeth. Her grip on the receiver tightens. Clarke closes her eyes for a moment, as if to clear away the plethora of images that try to crowd to the forefront. The endless possibilities of what could have gone wrong.

She blows them away with her exhale, opening her eyes to stare at the sky, purpling with early morning. "I know you'll figure it out. All of you will figure it out. Until then, . . . you know where to find me."

_______________________

He has the dream again.

It always starts and ends the same, with few things different in between.

He finds himself in a box, and someone is pouring ice water on him. Each time, Bellamy opens his mouth to tell whoever it is to stop, but his words always drown in the water, until everything is submerged, and it is too late to speak.

He can't see. But he can hear. And Bellamy listens as somewhere above the box is sealed shut. He listens as footsteps fade away, and he is simply left, alone, in the freezing dark.

Bellamy wakes with a fit of gasps. His shirt is wet, sticking to his back. He sits up and rubs his eyes, as if trying to scrub the remnants of the dream away. He's accustomed enough to shake it off quickly and leave his room.

Or, what he's taken as his room.

It's not so much as a bedroom than it is a private corner in the back of the ship, complete with an old sleeping bag and a few articles of clothing knotted together for a pillow. Bellamy didn't want to take a bunk in the ship barracks, those quarters a little too cramped for him. Five and a half years, and he still finds himself needing a modicum of personal space.

Bellamy walks down the dark corridor, dim, circadian bulbs the only thing to light his way. By Raven's definition, their wiring is ancient, she was almost surprised to find they lasted as long as they have.

"Morning, sleepy head," Says Raven, manning her usual spot before the motherboard in a chair so large it seems to swallow her. Bellamy gives a curt nod, throwing a cursory glance up at the screens.

He didn't think it could get more claustrophobic in space. But when he stepped onto this ship after allowing it to dock, only to find it utterly devoid of life, he found out that yes, yes it could.

"Any update?" he asks, eyes scanning the monitors, lingering for a moment on the current stats of a hundred unbeating hearts.

Raven shrugs. "Murphy repaired the soccer ball. Found some tape in one of the storage closets."

"Riveting."

Bellamy settles into one of the other chairs, frustration gnawing in his stomach.

_Six months._

It's been six months since they were due to land. Seven months since Bellamy learned that the Polis tower had fallen on the bunker door, trapping everyone inside.

The thought has grown more loud inside him, until his blood rings with it.

 _Are they still alive?_ The question hits him, again and again, as cold as the ice water in his dream. _Has Octavia-?_

_No._

His sister is alive. She would've found a way. Somehow. He reminds himself for the umpteenth time how long she managed to survive, trapped beneath the Ark floor. He reminds himself that if Clarke could still have hope after five and a half years, so can he.

It doesn't make it easier though. And it doesn't make him want to punch a wall any less.

"I'd ask if you had a rough night, but I think I already know the answer to that question," says Raven, breaking him from his thoughts.

Bellamy looks to find her eyes on him, scrutinizing him with raised brows. "And why's that?"

"You look like crap."

He grimaces. "Thanks."

"Look." She turns her chair around to face him, elbows on her knees. She runs a hand over the top of her head. "I get it. This is . . . taking a lot more time, and I know each of us are running on a fuse that gets shorter each day."

"We're doing everything we can," Bellamy says. His voice sounds a little flat, even to his own ears, but he knows they are true. " _You_ are doing everything you can. We'll make it back. You'll find a way. You always do."

Raven blows out a long, quiet breath, gaze flickering back to the screens. "No pressure or anything." She refocuses her attention on him. "Should I ask what the dream was about?"

Her words unsettle him. She knows. They all do. It's understandable, as they've all had them, now and then, over the years. Each has learned to be discreet in their own way, and everyone knows enough of their own nightmares not to ask questions about another's. It's the normal, in the stars.

It was normal many nights on the ground, too.

Bellamy lifts a shoulder dismissively, as if shrugging off the question. "Sounds like you asking to me."

"I mean it makes sense. Being this close."

_This close to going home._

Bellamy bites the inside of his cheek. "Yeah." He stands, the recycled air suddenly cloying. "Keep running the sim tests. I'll go make a round in the freezer."

He doesn't need to look at Raven to know she understands. She drops the topic like a stone. "Send up Emori on your way out, will you? We've gotta clock more test landings."

"That sounds more optimistic than crash landings," he says.

"That's me," she mumbles. "Just a ray of positivity."

______________________________

The freezer has always felt to Bellamy how space must be like, without the protection of the walls around him. He's found himself wondering if sleeping in ice feels the same as sleeping in the stars. He's wondered if that's what it felt like for those floated, but that's an answer they will never be able to give him.

As soon as the door slides open, a gust of cool air envelops him. Small circadian bulbs light up across the walkway, illuminating the spacious room. Once in Earth Skills, a lifetime ago, Bellamy heard of burial sites carved beneath the earth, where those who had passed would be placed on slabs of rock.

This is what that reminds him of.

Rows of tables protrude from the walls, holding an individual encased in a block of ice. The only difference is that these people are not dead.

Bellamy has yet to decide if that's better or worse. 

He's never felt as at ease walking through here as some of the others, but he's grown accustomed to it. There's just something unsettling about walking a hall containing 285 living, yet incapacitated, criminals who have been that way for over 100 years.

A gentle hush sounds, the whisper of something against the floor.

A shadow beneath the tables flickers.

Bellamy releases an unamused breath, the air visible in the cold. He stares at the crudely salvaged soccer ball that has come to a halt at his feet.

"Knock it off, Murphy."

From around one of the tables, appears Murphy, hands crammed into his pockets, a sullen expression on his face. "Sorry for trying to make a little entertainment for myself," he says sardonically. "Maybe I should take it out to the front-" he raises his index finger in a display of faux surprise. "Oh, wait a minute . . ."

"Emori's still not talking to you, I take it." They've been in a disagreement long enough for the rest of them to have heard of it. Then again, Bellamy's found that when either of the two are agitated at the other, news of it carries quickly, because even after six years, they still have yet to master the art of arguing quietly.

Murphy smiles without humor. "Nice code-cracking skills."

"Give it time."

"Last I checked, we were running out of that resource now, too," he muses. 

"Raven's working on the solution."

"Raven's _been_ working on the solution."

"So you think kicking a ball around up here is helping anything?"

Murphy shrugs. "It's certainly not making our problems worse."

"And this is the attitude of a survivor?" Bellamy asks, looking between the man and the partially deflated soccer ball. "I'd think a cockroach would have a better sense of self-preservation."

"I'm a realist, Bellamy. Five and a half years taught me that. Besides," he shrugs. "What do I have to go back for, anyway? It's not like anyone on the ground is that eager to see me."

Bellamy appraises the man who has somehow managed to become like a brother to him. It's weird, how things can change. Sometimes Bellamy forgets how they even started. This Murphy is not the same Murphy who was banished from the camp, so long ago. Bellamy is not the same Bellamy who banished him.

At least, his wish is that he's not.

"Hey," Bellamy places a hand on Murphy's shoulder and looks at him intently. " _We're_ going to the ground. We're a family, Murphy. And when we get back, we'll still be one there." He smirks. "Unless you really want to spend the rest of your life living on Monty's algae."

Murphy gives him a look of disgust and scoffs. "You're right. To die trying sounds like a better alternative by far."

Bellamy claps him on the shoulder. "That's the spirit."

__________________

She wonders if this is the time to stop.

Stop the calls. Stop the waiting. Stop all of it.

And for the first time, Clarke truly considers doing just that. Because after five and a half years of talking, she can't seem to find any more words, as though she's finally emptied herself of them all.

The thought is a crushing weight in her chest, pressing like a stone against her heart. Her calls have become as habitual as anything else, and Clarke knows that if she stops, it means she must accept that Bellamy and the others are gone.

Two thousand-seventeen days spent hoping, only for it to come to _this._

Clarke fiddles with the receiver, eying the black sky above her, stars scattered across the darkness in a dust of light. Slowly she lifts the radio to her lips. She presses the button. For a long time, there's silence.

"I'm not going to say how many days it's been," she breathes softly. "It's today. And today . . . I'm still choosing hope."

______________

Some victories come dramatically. Like a war, they build, step by step and brick by brick, until it is something seen on the horizon.

Others come suddenly, in the quiet and the seemingly mundane.

"Guys . . . I have it."

Today is one of those days.

Bellamy almost doesn't register Raven's words, stirring the bowl of algae with listless fingers and a hunger that hasn't been quelled for six years. But then her voice comes into focus. Her words sharpen to a blade that pierces through the fog.

Bellamy looks up at her abruptly, her eyes as wide as his feel. He can see that light in them.

"You have it," he repeats.

Raven smiles slowly. "I have an idea."

Before he even realizes it, he is standing and all eyes are on her.

"You sure this time?" Murphy asks, a little hesitant, worried to get his hopes up. "Some other _ideas_ haven't exactly panned out."

Raven crosses her arms. "I mean, it's not exactly risk-free."

"By risk free, you mean likely fatal, right?"

That light in her eyes doesn't dim. "Right."

Murphy actually smiles, and this time, it's real. He pushes his own bowl far enough away from him that it's in danger of falling off the table. "It's about time, Reyes. When do we start?"

"Before we get into technicalities, there's one thing we'll have to do. And none of you will like it."

"Come on, Raven," says Harper, leaning across the table. "You can give us more credit than that."

"Yeah," injects Murphy. "I'm sure that there's a lot more than one thing about this we won't like."

"What is it?" asks Bellamy. He doesn't care one way or the other. He'll spacewalk if he has to. He would walk through the stars if it meant getting back to the ground.

Raven looks at him, brown eyes grim. "We're gonna have to wake the pilot."


End file.
